It seems like a lifetime ago. November 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I visited Japan during the island nation’s vibrant fall colours. She was returning after 40 years. My first trip was with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2016, such a great experience that I convinced her to join me on AGGV’s 2019 tour.
Barry Till developed the Victoria Gallery’s acclaimed Asian art collection over his 35-year career, and he is a wonderful, experienced travel guide once again, joined by Japanese national guide Toshi Kushiki.
Ten of the 20 art lovers on our tour bus were returnees from the 2016 tour, and it was a tight-knit, enthusiastic group.
My wife organized a weeklong visit to traditional hotels (ryokan) with natural hot spring baths (onsen) the week before AGGV’s guided tour began. We had our own English-speaking driver who took us up into the mountains and the tiny, family-run ryokan.
We flew from Vancouver to Tokyo to Osaka and took a train to a seaside ryokan in Beppu. We needed a good mineral bath soak after that, and our hotel’s onsen was on the roof overlooking the inland sea, a natural dreamscape of hot spring bliss.
Multi-course traditional breakfasts and dinners were included with our tatami-floored, futon and quilt-furnished room. I’d soak as the sun rose over the ocean, then wear the hotel’s cotton yukata down to breakfast, and soak again after dinner beneath a starry sky. We even soaked mid-day at Beppu’s famous, 1879-built, black sand bath, Takegawa Onsen.
After showering and wearing yukatas to a subterranean room, we stretched out in trenches dug by two young attendants. They buried us to our heads with steaming, black sand heated by one of Beppu’s numerous hot springs.
After 15 minutes soaking up the heated sand’s healing powers (and a little snooze), I showered again and joined the other guests hydrating and watching the national sumo wrestling championship on the onsen lobby’s television.
We took a small train from Beppu and then a bus into the mountains above rice fields to the Usuki stone Buddhas, huge 12th century-carved National Treasures. We took another train to Yufuin and met our uniformed driver, who drove us on narrow roads further into the mountains. We hiked into view of a smoking, volcanic Mt. Aso and stayed at a pair of traditional ryokans where we had the finest meals I’ve ever enjoyed, dozens of courses of tiny, artful, regional delicacies.
We feasted, soaked, and slept with the windows open, listening to the little rivers below and breathing cold, sweet mountain air. One afternoon, while roaming around centuries-old temple grounds, the vision of deep purple petals from a venerable Camellia strewn artfully across a sun-seared carpet of golden Ginkgo leaves left me breathless with its beauty.
We joined our tour group in Fukuoka at a large hotel that had one floor outfitted for elegant, traditional weddings. We chanced upon sumo wrestlers working out in nearby temple grounds, visited the city’s well-curated Asian Art Museum and sampled Fukuoka’s famous street food before moving on to Hiroshima.
Visiting the Peace Memorial’s ghostly remnants of the atomic bomb, I had another epiphany when we overheard a young choir performing outside the museum. Hiroshima was a heartbreaking experience, a gift of remembrance, darkness and light.
So much of our tour conjured images of darkness and light, ancient and modern, extreme contrasts. We’d spend the night in a 16th century mountain temple, sharing a scorching soak with monks in a well-worn wooden onsen and then bus down to Osaka’s neon-lit bustle where we’d dine on 21st century street food and then skyscraper-elegant, pan-cultural fusion meals high above Japan’s second city.
Barry and Toshi planned many of these mind-snapping juxtapositions and contrasts, but some, maybe most, seemed to emerge from the country’s essence. A Shibori tie-dye workshop was a trip into a traditional Kyoto family business and great fun, as was a soba noodle-making afternoon and meal at a miniscule mountain village near Iya Valley.
A day after that we took the jet ferry to Naoshima Island’s very modern art House Project and Benesse House Resort’s beautiful seaside design and elegant French/Japanese gourmet meals. Better yet was their euro-centric Modern Art Museum and large, mind-bending works by James Turrell and Kusama’s gigantic, playful, polka-dot squash sculptures dotting the inland sea shoreline.
We took a fish boat on a choppy ride back to Takamatsu and bussed an hour to Naruto and another hotel onsen and dinner with a chef’s dramatic, traditional tuna-cutting song while he sliced the big, fresh fish.
We visited Otsuka Museum and saw life-sized, all-ceramic recreations of the Sistine Chapel, van Gogh’s sunflowers (including versions of a pair lost to history), Monet’s water lilies on the museum roof overlooking the highway, and versions of Giotto’s 14th century paintings.
There were costume trunks for selfies while dressed like Mona Lisa and Girl with the Gold Earring, and other famous paintings. It sounds like tour group-kitsch, but if I had young kids, I’d take them here before their first trip to Europe and the crowds surrounding the real thing. They can walk through art history and touch everything!
Part of our tour was an introduction to Japanese food beyond sushi rolls. We ate around a grill at a 12-stool okonomyaki bar as an omelette was stuffed with cabbage, scallions, sprouts, shrimp, squid and then fried on the grill oozing with secret sauce. In the heat and din of a half-century old, multi-floored co-op where dozens of okonomyaki bars emptied into a chaotic street scene below fueled with cold beer and hot sake, a street fair featuring taiko drums and truck bed kabuki theatre in the glow of Christmas lights. Ancient and modern Japan clashed and dazzled, and I can’t wait to go back!
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