I just thought of one more thing I wanted to tell you about the Kushiro wetlands: Watch where you are going! Turns out that much of the surface of wetlands is below the water table, so if your step on an innocent plain of grass you can sink 3 or 4 meters through a below-the-water grassland into a meter or so of mud, whereas the deer browsing 10 meters away from you are on soggy but firm ground. Gives you second thoughts about straying away from the beaten path.
After a delightful night in a fine hotel, I woke up at about 3:30 am, right at day break, brewed myself a cup of coffee, and went down to the onsen or spa, which is a tradition in Japan. Given the chance, a Japanese would go to the onsen in the morning, after lunch, and after dinner, to loosen up and achieve a state of Zen. In a hotel this would be a comparatively large facility, separate from men and women, where you first are supposed to shower yourself, and in the buff go and join others who are just soaking in the warm water. This particular onsen had an inside warm pool and an outside one, where I soaked for a long while enjoying my coffee and the wind blowing through the pines. Need I say that at that early time I was the only human being awake, so I truly achieved a state of Zen communing with nature.
The island of Hokkaido was originally inhabited by the Ainu, a group whose cultural roots have not been clearly elucidated. To me they look like Siberians, although some people argue they could be Inuits. They occupied Hokkaido and the other islands in the Sea of Okhtosk, happily trading between Honshu (central Japan) and Russia, when the ethnic Japanese decided, during the Meiji restoration (late 1800's), that they needed more elbow room and invaded the peaceful Ainu and took over Hokkaido. What followed was the typical tale of woe of a conquered people, with the Ainu language and culture being proscribed by the invaders. The Ainu resisted, almost on the brink of extinction, and finally in 2007 were acknowledged as the original inhabitants of the island and graciously allowed to preserve whatever was left of their culture (which was precious little). We went to see a small "modern" Ainu village, where a local guide took us for a walk through the forest to show us indigenous uses of the different trees and plants, talk about their religion (nature animism), and shock us with a retelling of the tradition of killing a she bear, capturing the cubs, raising them in a cage at the village for a couple of years, and then killing them ritualistically so they could carry the message to the rest of nature about the good treatment they had received at the hands of the Ainu (not surprisingly, they got their official recognition in 2007, and 5 seconds later the Japanese government prohibited the practice of bear capture). The Ainu are master wood carvers, but I don't really see a future for them in modern Japan.
Note: As I am writing these notes I have the TV turned on, not understanding much of anything, but I am getting a headache from the flashing colors used on every screen. I also note that one of the programs promotes something that looks like menudo and also some sort of bean curd floating on fat. Next time you cringe at Mexican food, consider that you too could have been born in Japan. Hmm, it looks like a typhoon is headed for Kyushu, the southern island of Japan.
The afternoon was a geologist's dream. We drove up into the mountains to see Mount Io, which for all practical purposes could be best described as the Gates of Hell! It is a dacite dome, through the middle of which rise active fumaroles that have accumulated large amounts of bright yellow sulfur. Where did this come from? I started looking around and convinced myself that this was one of several domes, perhaps similar to the Inyo domes. Then we started walking away and I realized that this was a central massif lodged inside the larger arc of the Kussharo Caldera. OMG, this is the resurgent dome of the caldera, which is a good 20 km in diameter, and where half of the moat is occupied by Lake Kussharo.
The walk away from the resurgent dome and toward the rim of the caldera was delightful. There was alternating light drizzle and dry overcast, but nothing that could deter a tough group of adventurers, and we got treated to a fabulous ecological transition from the barren slopes of Mt. Io (which, by the way, gave the moon of Jupiter its own name to acknowledge the sulfur eruptions in Io) with is highly acidic soils, to a belt of bracken, followed by a belt of dwarf pines, to a belt of Labrador tea, to a belt of white birches, farther joined by spruces and firs to form a typical Hokkaido forest. This spatial transition could also be a proxy for the age transition of a maturing forest.
When we got back to the small town of Kawayuonsen we rewarded our feet with a soak in the municipal foot-onsen, before heading to our lodge, at the shore of Lake Kussharo. And now I feel the call of the local onsen, so I will bring this message to a close.
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