One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”

27 August 2023

• Hitchhiking from Yuzawa to Sendai
• Spending hours on the floor inside Sendai station again…
• My first manga café

Hitchiking to Sendai

I left my Yuzawa host’s house at 9:00 with the intention of spending today hitchhiking.

I’d never done anything like this, because in Israel, hitchhiking equalled death. (Seriously – one of the wars from the previous decade had started after three Jewish kids were murdered this way.) But over the past few months, I’d been meeting travellers who had told me stories of their successful hitchhiking in Japan. The country in the world where I felt the safest in attempting to do that.

Plus, all the buses to Tokyo were fully booked, and I couldn’t afford a bullet train.

So I stood at the nearest highway for twenty minutes or so, presenting a paper that read 東京 (“Tokyo”), until a car pulled over.

The driver was a fifty-something local who had never flown or been abroad, nor seen any of the Tohoku festivals. My month in Tohoku and everything I’d managed to do and see astounded her.

We stopped at Lawson; she bought me breakfast, and dropped me off at Ogachi roadside station, thirty minutes later.

There, I stood for a whole hour under the sun carrying my sign, until a tall, fancy, black van pulled over.

He was a 25-year-old from Sendai, who had spent his childhood in Akita, and even participated in Kanto festival. The kind of dope, laid-back guy with a cool hairstyle and fashion style that reminded me of big-city youth in Japan: something I hadn’t beheld in a while. 

He’d driven to Omagari yesterday and spent the night at his Yokote friend’s house, close to Yuzawa. We talked about dating in Japan and abroad most of the time. It hit me that this was a topic I’d never discussed with my Japanese friends. He’d immediately gone into it, though; he was very confident, and very curious about girls abroad.

From ~11:30-14:00, he drove south, until we reached Sendai Izumi outlet mall, outside the city. Lunch was tempura shrimp, rice, miso soup – teishoku again. He insisted on paying.

Finally, at 15:20, he dropped me off at Sendai station. It felt like we’d become friends; like we’d hang out again, if I ever returned to this city.

I hadn’t planned on returning to Sendai for a third time. But this was as good as I could get to today.

Inside the station, I settled once more on the floor near the Shinkansen ticket gate, and thought about my next move. (WHY was the station always full of old people group tours who gathered near the Shinkansen gate, every single time I’d come here? WHY was there no lounge?!)

Options for today onwards:

Couchsurfing requests – sent a bunch more – again, no response.

Night bus to Tokyo – sold out for today.

Time to try sleeping at an internet café, I settled: an experience that had been on my list for months.

In a way, returning to Sendai was a good call. I resolved to visit Matsushima Bay tomorrow, one of Japan’s top 3 scenic views, which I’d missed the previous two times.

I logged into Instagram for the first time in eight days. The Canadian guy from Omagari fireworks, who’d been dying to visit Dewa Sanzan – I’d managed to arrange for him to couchsurf at my Sakata host’s place and for them to visit Dewa Sanzan together, like I had. Instagram was my only way of contacting the Canadian guy, who said I’d made his trip.

Upon logging in, I noticed that the Korean student had replied to my text from eight days ago, while I was at the digital detox ryokan.

The first time I’d heard from him since Korea… he must’ve thought all this time I’d been ignoring him on purpose.

My First Internet Cafe

In the evening, I grabbed a zunda shake (forever a must in Sendai) and consulted the tourist information centre regarding day trips. My next two days were immediately formed.

Then I checked into a chain of internet cafés my Tokyo friend had once recommended to me.

It took me a while to understand how such a place worked, but once I did…

Huge smile on my face.

Internet cafés, or manga cafés, had started off as a place for people to read manga for a long time. They’d evolved into including private booths with computers, for watching movies and playing video games. Eventually, people started spending the night at these places, and now they’d become known as a “last-resort” sort of situation.

Walls of manga everywhere. Snacks, instant noodles, even a menu where one could order curry. Private shower stalls, and tons of tiny booths. Not to mention the unlimited drink bar. 15 kinds of soft drinks; 6 kinds of coffee hot and ice, hot and ice chocolate milk, plus an unlimited ice cream machine.

How was today my first time in a ne-café?

There was nothing Japanese people hadn’t thought of.

As I settled into my booth and drank perhaps too many cups, I recalled convenience being the most important value in South Korea. Japan was, as evident by such a ne-café, convenient as well; there were even self-check-in and check-out machines, and the computer told you how long you’d stayed, and how much you needed to pay. 

To me the different between the countries was clear. Japan was convenient and fun. This country, full of quirks and idiosyncrasies, possessed a charm one couldn’t find anywhere else on this planet.

Japan was an oddball – but in a way, so was I. To me, it was home.

Here, there was a logic behind everything. Even the way you picked up a bowl. Not everyone agreed with that logic, and so, not everyone was so bent on following the strict social norms. But if you agreed with them… this country was as close as one got to heaven.

Granted, the booth was too small for my legs, and despite being padded, felt too stiff. I grabbed a couple of short, thin blankets and a couple of padded, rectangular blocks for the world’s hardest pillows, and went to bed at midnight. Today was a successful day.

Today’s highlights: managing to hitchhike twice from the countryside all the way to a big city; zunda shake; my first ne-café.

28 August 2023

• 8:55-9:35 Sendai station to Matsushima Kaigan station local train (Senseki line)
• Matsushima fish market
• Matsushima Bay (~4h)
• 15:10-15:50 Matsushima Kaigan station to Sendai station local train, 16:25-16:35 transfer to subway to Tomizawa station (Namboku line)

Matsushima Bay

I woke at 7:15 stiff. The mat was too small for me to sleep in a comfortable position. I must’ve woken between 5-10 times throughout the night from discomfort.

It didn’t help that the lights inside the ne-café were perpetually on, music was playing, and the AC was set to “Hokkaido in February”. The blanket provided was thin and small.

Despite all this, it was a valuable experience, which I would definitely like to repeat. In a room with a reclining message chair, next time.

I checked out at 8:30 and took the train to Matsushima Bay.

A picturesque location, hot and windy. I started off with fish market, because I was ravenous. The local specialty: deep fried oysters. Delicious.

There was a strong scent of sea and seafood all over town.

Matsushima Bay was considered one of Japan’s top three scenic views, alongside Miyajima (which I’d visited in March) and Amanohashidate (which I hoped to visit in the distant future). More than 2,500 small islands were scattered in a bay, offering tremendous views. I explored the area for the next four broiling hours, practically steaming from today’s heat.

First stop: Fukuurajima island (30m). I circled it by crossing wooden pathways and forested nature trails, passing a small shrine and a rest pavilion. View of tiny islands scattered across the bay. Very beautiful, as expected, and serene. Black-and-bright-blue butterflies, clear sky – I almost stepped on a long snake that slithered at once away. Soothing streaming of water.

Cruise ships and sail boats. A flower garden with old but deft origami. Diamond sea, sparkling like in Miyajima, except the water was a dirty green.

The five-hall Godaido temple was pretty, but took mere ten minutes. It was called so because it enshrined the great five kings. Moreover, it was known for the two red bridges that led to it, with precarious openings that required visitors to remain vigilant and watch their step.

As soon as I entered the grounds Zuiganji temple, I felt like I’d entered a different world.

Silence. The bay was noisy with cars. But here – crickets and tall trees. Cave openings with small sculptures of Boddhisatvas. Peaceful, simple, serene.

Zuiganji was famous for its gold sliding door art, but too expensive an entry for me. I’d already viewed enough sliding door art in Round One.

The nearby Entsuin temple also cost entry, so no. The cruise was only 1,000 yen but again, out of budget… so I walked instead to the sacred island – a half-an-hour course featuring more cave openings with Buddhist sculptures and views of the bay.

I finished exploring the bay with Saigyo Modoshi no Matsu park. A 20-minute ascent from the station, 20 minutes there, and a 20-minute descent.

First, I climbed up a road to the park, a climb that felt like ascending to hell. The observation points over the bay were an adequate reward, though – particularly Matsushima Observation Deck Byakui Kannon, the best view of the bay.

There was also a pine tree related to Saigyo, the famous poet, whose secluded mountain hut I’d visited in April in Yoshino-yama.

I finished with the bay at 14:30, with an hour to spare. After eating and resting inside the station, I took two trains to my couch-surfing hosts’ for tonight, a young couple with a baby who lived in the outskirts of Sendai. I dragged my suitcase for a gruelling, sweaty twenty minutes to their house, an old, traditional, one storey structure in a suburb.

They were relatively new to couch-surfing; I might’ve been their second guest. The husband had previously travelled to forty countries, and now sought to return the favour.

We ate homemade curry for dinner (my second curry in Japan, loads better than Coco Ichinbanya) and talked about a lot of things, Israel once again being one of the main topics. The husband had visited it briefly in 2014 and wanted to understand the logic behind the Middle Eastern conflict.

It was my first time being asked this in Japan, and, possessing no army-related vocabulary, I struggled to even scratch the surface. He got the gist of it, though. It was quite simple, at the end of the day. Religion, racism, and a silly concept known as “birthright”.

I dozed off at 22:00, after walking 25,000 steps today in 35 degrees.

Today’s highlights: fried oysters; the view of the bay; homemade curry for dinner.

29 August 2023

• 8:52-9:05 Tomizawa station to Sendai station subway (Namboku line), 9:20-10:30 Sendai station (bus stop number 22) to Yamagata station bus, 11:20-12:05 bus to Zao Onsen bus terminal
• Zao Onsen large outdoor bath (2h)
• 15:20-16:05 Zao Onsen to Yamagata station bus, 16:15-17:30 bus to Sendai station
• Spending hours again on the floor inside Sendai station!!!!!!!!!!!
• 23:25-6:05 Sendai Station west exit (Miyakoh Sendai Highway bus center, bus stop 40) to Ikebukuro sunshine city bus terminal night bus

I woke at 6:30, unable to fall back to sleep. My hosts were already up, since they had a baby.

Breakfast was ironically like my usual one in Israel. Yogurt, banana, toast with jam.

「久しぶり」I exclaimed while devouring it. (“It’s been a while.”)

I savoured every bite of that honey banana yogurt mix.

Afterwards, we went for a stroll with their baby to the nearby river. Having put on my Harry Potter t-shirt today for the first time in weeks (or months? Everything else in my luggage needed washing), and once they’d learned I had a brother and a sister the same age, the husband pointed out my resemble to the titular character, and how me and my siblings formed a triplet reminiscent of the trio (Harry, Ron, and Hermione).

No one had ever told me this before. My siblings and I different too much to even begin to resemble a tight-knit group of friends, but it was an interesting thought nonetheless.

Back in their home, I’d written a message on a wall they’d begin designating as a message board from their couch-surfing guests. A nice tradition, I thought.

Finally, they dropped me off at the train station (thank god – not walking again), and I set off to today’s day trip.

It was yet another full day spent on reaching a secluded onsen in Tohoku. This time, I made sure to pick a rotenburo, and a large, famous one at that.

It was either Zao Onsen or Ginzan onsen. The latter was a famous, traditional, picturesque onsen town known for its old buildings; yet, as the tourist information centre had explained, the baths were all indoors and odour-less.

“If you want a stinky onsen, there’s a famous rotenburo in Zao,” they’d told me.

When it came to onsens, the rule of the thumb was: the stinkier, the better.

Zao Onsen

Following multiple bus rides up Zao mountain, I arrived at another onsen town buried in nature.

Immediate reeking. Sulphur had become my favourite stench. I dragged my suitcase up the mountain for half an hour through town, built on a slope. Barely anyone was around.

The rotenburo was right at the top of the town, inaccessible in winter due to heavy snowfall. There were neither toilets, nor a washing area inside; no soap, shampoo, anything.

Yet it was one of the best rotenburos I’d been too. As a matter of fact, I’d never seen anything like it.

Two large, stony pools, their water milky white, almost pale blue, and their rocks acid yellow, so bright that they seemed white. One pool was 42 degrees, the other 44. Both situated inside a forest.

The astounding feature was actually the small stream of water running parallel to the pools, down the hill. The stones submerged in the water were painted a deep shade of green, as if moss had grown on them. But no. It was only the stones washed by hot spring water that were coloured so.

The water was hot. I spent two hours inside the rotenburo, once again finding the soaking too sizzling to tolerate for more than two minutes. Most of the time I yawned while shifting positions on the rocks, where I tried to nap. I was sleepy from the moment I touched the water.

The ending was the standout moment for me. I noticed an old man venture into the green stream and sit on the rocks. So I followed suit.

The stream must’ve been 60 degrees or so. My butt burned as the water gushed down the hill. An unforgettable, primal moment. This rotenburo was worth spending another full day on public transportation.

Upon heading out, a staff member saw me struggling to open my coin locker, and helped me without uttering a sound. I got dressed and rested for a bit before putting on my shoes. I was hungry, thirsty, and hot, my blood pressure still low. The staff member returned and gave me a souvenir, again without uttering a sound. I almost left, when he returned and pointed at the postcards…

“I can speak Japanese,” I told him in his language.

Once we started chatting and he heard I’d walked all the way from the bus terminal, he offered to give me a ride. Thank GOD. He even wrote down the name of a great rotenburo near Sendai, after my love for them had become clear.

It Started in Sendai, It Ended in Sendai

I took the bus back to Yamagata station, and noticed a text message. From the family member of a Japanese guy who lived in Tokyo, near Miitaka.

I waited until I had proper Wi-Fi to give it a proper look, because at first glance, without a dictionary, it didn’t seem so auspicious. So the next two and a half hours were rather tense. I got off at Sendai and ate hyotan-age before the stand that originated it closed again. It was unbelievably delicious.

At Sendai station, I read the text message.

It wasn’t what I’d expected.

ケセン君へ

元気そうですね、良かった！

日本に来て楽しんでますか？

何度かの連絡をありがとう

彼には伝わっています。

今、彼は病気を持っていて返事ができないのだと思います。

どうぞ、身体に気をつけて✋

日本での旅が輝きますように✨

よき思い出をこころに✨✨

返信が遅くなりました事、許してください。ありがとう😊

Me looking for six months for a guy who had wanted to meet me again, and managing to find him, only for him to not seem too bent on replying… had not appeared on my bingo card for this trip.

It might be a bit shady of me to post the message here, but I couldn’t let the phrasing go. The entire response seemed a bit off, because his mom replied in his stead, and used pronouns instead of names: an oddity, no, a BIZZARE choice in the Japanese language, ESPECIALLY among family members. I had no confirmation that it was him, nor that my message had reached him.

Yet it must’ve been him. The address matched what he’d told me.

Sendai station was where I’d last seen him, on my last day in Tohoku, back in February. Now, on my last day in Tohoku, it was where I found him.

My night bus to Tokyo would depart in a few hours. I’d reckoned it would be perfect timing, for me to return there at the culmination of my search. I had genuinely believed that we would reunite in Tokyo. After that text, however, I didn’t know what to think.

Once again, I found a person who’d grown close to me, and now no longer wished to message me. Once again, I was left in the dark. Not knowing what was going on.

I always preferred being told the truth. It would’ve been better for him to reply himself and say that he was too busy to hang out. Did his mom think I was a stalker who shouldn’t come anywhere near her and her family? After we’d had a nice chat in the ryokan?

Maybe he was indeed too sick to even use a phone. Who knew what went on behind that message. Not me.

Maybe this incident was destined to remain a mystery. After all, such was life. Nothing you wanted worked out, and you died without getting any answers about the nature of your existence. 

I refused to believe that he didn’t want to even say hi to me. He had done everything in his power the last time to communicate his desire to meet. I hadn’t been imagining things. I hadn’t been making a big deal out of nothing.

It made more sense for my message to have never reached him.

But why? Why keep me away from him? Why not even use his name in the message?

I recalled what I’d written in my post from August 19, before returning to the ryokan. If people repeatedly shunned from me – if people who had once texted me on a daily basis, who’d bought me presents and inquired about our next encounter, who had promised to stay in my life, ignored me – then there must be something irreparably wrong with me. I sat on the floor inside Sendai station for five hours, until my night bus, and confronted the no-longer-deniable notion… that I was the problem.

And so, for all the wrong reasons, Sendai station had become almost a mythical place for me. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever like to set foot in it again.

But what exactly was wrong with me? Where had I erred? There had to be something in my modus operandi that I was blind to. What was the reason I couldn’t get to him? What was the reason people spurned me? What was the reason for all these interpersonal struggles?

What was the reason.

The first month and a half of my trip, my posts were full of acrimony towards the human race. For the way people behaved, and the way society was organized, and the hardships this so-called intelligent race brought on a daily basis onto one another. I vividly remember my first post in Japan, from February 12, being full of existential hatred.

Since then, I’d come to live more in the present moment, and focus on present hardships, such as my relationships with people I’d been meeting on this trip. But now…

I didn’t know if I could withstand another disappointment.

I left the station at 23:00 without bothering to grab a farewell zunda shake from Sendai. Not even my favourite drink in Japan could lighten my mood.

The night bus was just a regular bus one was somehow supposed to sleep in. I could never fall asleep while sitting down. And the cramped chairs, the confined atmosphere, the late hour, and my physical and emotional exhaustion – I could barely sleep, that night, despite all that, despite taking melatonin.

En route back to Tokyo. 4 days in Tohoku in February, 26 days in August. My one month in Tohoku wasn’t the only thing that had come to an end.

Today’s highlights: that breakfast; Zao Onsen; hyotan-age.