We headed for the countryside in a mountain area about an hour and a half away from Hiroshima. The plan was to visit some parks where you can see beautiful wild flowers and the occasional bird or interesting bug, stop at some little tea house in the middle of nowhere and in general soak in the good old beautiful Japan.
We got there around noon, and thought we would start with lunch by a lake in a little hamlet called Shoujiki Mura (translation: Honest Village). Nothing bad can come out of a place with such name, and this one more than lived up to our expectations. First of all, the setting was stunning. A wooded area by a lake, with 3 buildings and no other civilization in sight: a very rustic and tiny restaurant, a B&B with only two rooms, and a microscopic chapel. We were ready to stroll around, but a sign clearly directed us to order our lunch before enjoying the grounds. There were 3 dishes you could order and one immediately caught my eye: "chapati". Hmmm... For those not familiar with Indian cuisine, chapati is a kind of flat bread - the staple that every Indian mom makes from scratch to feed the family twice a day. I didn't expect a chapati menu in the middle of the Japanese countryside to bear much resemblance to those out of Kumar's mom's kitchen, but couldn't resist it... And this is what turned up at the table: a fairly accurate chapati topped with minced lamb meat and shredded cabbage. And bottles of ketchup and mustard on the side.
While enjoying our chapatis (which turned our quite yummy) we found out that on that evening there would be a Taiko concert. Taiko are traditional Japanese drums. I had seen two Taiko concerts before, at a dramatic setting in a shrine at the Miyajima island. The first time I saw "Ondekoza", the best Taiko band in Japan. As it turned out, the concert on Saturday was by one of the members of Ondekoza and two of his disciples. I could not believe that this guy would be playing on the grounds of a 3-table restaurant in the middle of nowhere... Needless to say, we decided to come back.
Meanwhile, we did everything we had planned to do that afternoon: visited the oldest building in the area, walked through a park for flower and bug photography, stopped for tea at the most charming little spot run by two sweet old ladies, drove up the mountain and literally immersed ourselves in a thick cloud...
Just before 6:00 we came back to the Honest Village for the Taiko concert.
After the concert we drove back to civilization, spent the night at my friend Misako's weekend flat by the sea, sipped wine in the balcony watching the ferries cross the bay back and forth from Miyajima, and woke up ready for a fun morning before heading back to the city.
As a final stop, we had lunch at this traditional restaurant that serves only one dish: eel. The kind they serve is a local eel breed (instead of "unagi" it is called "anago"). The difference between the two is that anago live in an area where there's plenty of oysters. Since they feed on oysters, their meat has a very special (stronger) flavor. Whatever it is, it certainly works: the wait to get in the restaurant is about 2 hours! We out-smarted the crowd and went in just before 11. The restaurant itself is in this very old wooden building, part of which serves as a museum. After lunch we walked around, and while at it saw a tiny animal moving on top of a chair... The size of a good-size cockroach, furry like a mouse or scary spider but none of those animals... On closer examination, we discovered it was a baby bat! It was my first encounter with such a creature and I stopped short from adopting it and bringing it home. The room was dark and I had the wrong lens on my camera, so don't judge the quality of the picture... but I figured you might want to see what a baby bat looks like even if grainy and a bit out of focus.
We were scratching (and looking over) our heads wondering how that baby got to that chair and where its mother was. Talking to my dad in the evening, he explained that baby bats are carried by their mothers as they fly. This little guy must have been dropped. Apparently getting down to the ground is a bat's end, as they can't take flight from the ground. So once dropped, mom must not have been able to come down and pick him up.
Anyway, I didn't bring the bat home, but there's more images (of him, Taiko players, flowers, bugs and other wonders) here.
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