Tomorrow I’m going on a bit of a vacation to northern Japan with my son, a fun trip that we’re taking now since next summer he’ll be a jukensei or test student, and will be doing little except for studying for his high school entrance exams. We’ll be taking one of those overnight busses all the way up to Aomori Prefecture, at the top of the main Japanese island of Honshu, where we’ll do some sightseeing in Hirosaki and (knowing me) find an onsen hot springs bath to take a dip in. After that we’ll catch the ferry across to Hokkaido to visit one of my favorite cities, Hakodate (ha-ko-DAH-tay), checking out some cool historical sites as well as the most beautiful night view in Japan. Then we’ll do something we’ve always wanted to do: take the train from Hokkaido back to Aomori, which goes through the Seikan Tunnel, the longest and deepest tunnel in the world. Our real goal is to visit the train station that exists under the sea, because damn, it’s a train station under the sea! We just have to go there. (If you’re a fan of Twitter and are so inclined, you can follow us on our journey.)
Aomori lies at the extreme end of the Tohoku (lit. “east-north”) region of Japan, an area that’s historically been so far from the cultural heart of the nation (Kyoto, then Edo/Tokyo) that it didn’t develop at the same pace at the rest of the country. As you travel farther north, the place names start to sound funny, and the kanji characters used to write them get equally bizarre, so that a person from Tokyo will actually have to stop and ask locals how to read a certain kanji on his map. (Heh, give them a taste of what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan.) The reason for this, of course, is that northern Japan was settled by the Ainu, who were once everywhere in the region before they were pushed northward by the expanding Yamato Japanese. The Ainu possess a separate language and culture which among other things involves — I am not making this up — tattooing moustaches on the upper lips of their women. Which may or may not be one reason why they’re not running the country these days.
Aomori Prefecture is famous for apples,Nebuta, and snow; Hirosaki is the “Kyoto of the North.”
