City of Cartoons

In Japan everyone is crazy about cartoons, fanatical about the fantastical.

Tokyo is no different. Like the proverbial rat in London, in Tokyo you are never more than six feet away from a cartoon of some sort.

There are the advertising medium of choice for many businesses; the film (anime) of choice for many cinemagoers, the book of choice for all and sundry.

On the metro you are just as likely to see a businessman perusing manga (comic books) as you are to see a schoolkid flicking through the backpages of their favourite superhero.

Indeed, such is the Japanese mania for manga, their ardour for anime, that it’s sometimes had to tell whether some of them have a steady grip on reality. Certainly for me, after spending a few days in Tokyo it has become hard at times to discern what is real and what is make-believe.

This is a city which celebrates the outlandish and delights in being over the top. It is drenched in neon, buzzing to the tune of a million different polyphonic jingles.

We enter a megalopolis of such fantastical wonders where, it seems, anything is possible. There’s capsule hotels, rollercoasters on top of office blocks and people bowing all over the place.

In Tokyo, art imitates life, then life imitates art and becomes a cartoon.

This is a city of cartoons.

The following are some of my favourite characters.

Lightsabre man

Around Ginza Lightsabre man is busy at work. There‘s traffic to direct, people to usher across the road.

Move over Batman, stand aside Spiderman - Lightsabre man is a true superhero.

Carefully attired in his regulation uniform - reflective stripes, white helmet, white gloves and trusty glowing baton - he guards Tokyo’s good citizens against all possible hazards, from potholes and roadworks to broken-down escalators and car park exits.

Lightsabre man is anywhere and everywhere, ever vigilant and primed to act. A true hero of the streets.

Visor Woman

Up in Asakusa, Visor Woman heads for the temple, camera at the ready. She’s been hard at it in the hot sunshine, taking in the sights of this vast city, ticking off the must-sees.

And she’s well-equipped for this awesome task.

On her head she sports a sun visor so huge her companions could eat their okonomi-yaki (Japanese pizza) off it. This massive millinery monster covers her head and indeed her face, so much so that it could double as a motorcycle helmet, or indeed protective wear for any budding astronaut.

To complement this, Visor Woman chooses comfortable trainers, casual trousers, a blouse, handbag and miniature towel to discreetly dab her brow in the heat.

And seeing that it is thirty degrees and the sun is high in the sky she plumps for the gloves ‘n’ arm covers look as well, just to ensure every inch of flesh is covered. It just wouldn’t do to go back to the folks back home with a suntan.


Pachinko man

Down in Roppongi Pachinko man’s making a killing. Working the one-armed bandits and other yen-grabbing machines he an old hand at the gambling game.

When it comes to slot machines, Pachinko man knows every trick in the book. He’s surrounded by a piles of ball bearings, coughed up by the machines as winnings and stacked up in boxes on the floor around him.

Well-adapted to withstanding a sensory assault like no other, Pachinko man is immune to the wall of sound, the epileptic fit-inducing flashing lights and the heavy fug of fag smoke.

Amidst this cacophony he inhabits his cocoon, ceaselessly working the unfathomable games till it starts to grow light outside.

Then it’s off home his newly gained winning, to bed and dreams of a Sega-filled paradise.

Salaryman

Way out west, amidst the scryscrapers of Shinjuki, Salaryman has his head buried away in his account sheets.

Salaryman is the unsung hero of the nation, the worker ant of business, the backbone of the economy. He’ll willingly sacrifice his family time for the company, displaying unswerving loyalty in the cause of the balance sheet.

This city stalwart has been at it since 8.30 am, and will stay there until 6.30pm (if he’s lucky).

After work he’ll share a beer and slurp noodles with his colleagues, or brave the rush hour and head for home.

Salaryman is one of two million who pass through Shinjuku’s stations every day, short-sleeved robots, brandishing mobiles, briefcases and inbuilt sat-navs to help them follow the well-trodden path between office and home.

If he’s lucky Salaryman will find an inch of space on the Metro, room to sit down and peruse a document headed “Offsetting certificates of deposit against high-coupon debt”.

If not he’ll nod off on the train, yet still somehow wake up just as he pulls into his home station.

Salaryman is prone to tiredness from overwork and the sight of collapsed salaryman on the Metro, exhausted and a little the worse for wear, is not unusual.

Some 30,000 a year die due to overwork - the economic miracle came at a high price.

The rock kids

Over in Shibuya the kids are united. In their love for replicating their pop idols.

Here West meets East in a potent cocktail of haywire hormones and overweening peer pressure to keep up with the latest fashion.

Teenagers - large gangs of identical girls, smaller groups of swaggering boys - take to the streets and pout and preen their way to stage one of the great mating game.

Every detail is meticulously copied, from their hair and clothing to their attitude and gait.

Amidst the fickle flux of fashion, ‘Japlish’ endures. English words, Japanese grammar, rendering slogans on t-shirts incomprehensible to the bemused tourist: ‘Elephant special dreams’; Great bless my honor’; ‘Connects and it pulls’.

As a bloke named Brian once remarked ‘we are all individuals’.

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Plenty more fish in the sea?

The alarm sounded at 5.30am. Within the hour our sleepy heads were leaping over saline puddles and dodging mini pick-ups laden with treasures from the sea. This was Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. Every day over two thousand tonnes of fish and seafood pass from auction to wholesaler to restaurateur to sashimi platters and seafood soup. The Japanese consume a whopping thirty per cent of the world’s fresh fish. The market is a testament to this fact and a poignant reminder of the ruthless plundering of our marine resources. In an attempt to curb over fishing Japan’s quota has been slashed, but the market is still buzzing with increasing amounts of imported fish.

Given my time as a fish geek I can’t resist the opportunity to plug the work of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). Both working to reduce over fishing, promote sustainable fisheries and make sure that there is enough fish for us to enjoy for centuries to come. The MSC eco-label indicates fish that have come from well managed stocks, and the MCS Good Fish Guide is a useful guide to choosing good fish in a shop or restaurant.

In Japan, there is little evidence that the consumer gives a monkey’s about sustainable fisheries. One evocative example is bluefin tuna. This Japanese favourite, auctioned at the market as frozen torpedoes, is on the verge of extinction yet is still on sale across the country. However, alternatives are available. So when breaking my fast at 7am in a sushi shack in the market, I opted for king mackerel instead. Those few mouthfuls were the most succulent, soft and delicious morsels of fish that my mouth has ever experienced. For the delight of moments such as that, I sincerely hope that we all start to manage and consume fish more sustainably.

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Zen gardening

There’s not a lot of Zen in a Zen garden. At least not when you are surrounded by hordes of snap happy tourists, fresh off the coach armed with sun visors and umbrellas. All noisily pondering the meaning of the carefully placed rocks in the carefully raked sand pit, or perhaps just noisily discussing how the noodles were at lunch. Either way, noisily.

Then there is the wildlife: Large flying wind-up beetles revving and squawking away like canaries on motorbikes, butterflies that look like flying ewoks and mosquitoes. You can’t get any peace anywhere when there is a mosquito around, and during the humid days we were in Kyoto there were mosquitoes. Lots of them.

It is also difficult to gaze at the sand and rock scenes long enough to clear the mind or solve the riddle without getting photo guilt. The guilt you get when you know that you are spoiling other people’s photos by standing in the background, or next to them, or directly in front of the temple. But in a Zen garden in Kyoto in summer you simply can’t get out of the way. Instead, you quickly shuffle along the carefully trimmed path hemmed in by bamboo fences. Stunning as the temples and picturesque as the gardens may be, a stroll through a Zen garden isn’t quite the same meditative experience as it was for the masters of old.

But, there are those who appear to be having a Zen time of it. The Zen gardeners. This dedicated fleet of workers pimp and preen the gardens to perfection: Sweeping up fallen leaves, pulling out individual blades of grass and washing stones. Wearing long protective clothing, bonnets and mosquito coils, they are protected from the tourists and insects alike. Through such meticulous gardening practices they must surely be on their way to enlightenment.

For me, I didn’t get any closer to Buddha, nor did I solve the mystery of the sand patterns. However, I did write my first haiku:

In a Zen garden
Glow the first leaves of autumn.
Quickly, fetch the brush!

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Ban the bomb

The city we’re staying in is very pleasant. It’s bright, buzzing and modern. The sun smiles down on wide tree-lined avenues, where trams trundle past, carrying beachgoers down to sandy beaches dotted along the bay. Herons and egrets hunt along rivers which spread throughout the city like outstretched fingers, whilst kites wheel overhead and palms sway gently in the warm sea breeze.

But something is wrong, very wrong about this city - it holds a terrible past.

This city is Hiroshima.

63 years ago, this city, then of little global significance was suddenly, unwillingly, propelled in the pages of history, becoming the first city to experience the horrors of nuclear attack.

On 6th September 1945, at 8.15am, the Enola Gay, an American B29 bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, an atom bomb, on the heart of Hiroshima.

The resulting explosion, equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, obliterated an entire city, destroying 70,000 buildings and killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants.

And whilst this attack, combined with the subsequent atom bombing of Nagasaki three days later, ended the Second World War, Japan, and the world, would never be the same again.

Strolling along the river, flanked by all the trappings of a modern Japanese metropolis, I initially found it very hard to grasp the enormity of this single event.

But as we drew closer to ‘ground zero’, which was directly under the hypocentre of the blast, the pleasant surroundings became overshadowed by the ghostly apparition ahead of us. We faced a shell of a large building, its brick walls crumbling and decayed, it’s domed roof reduced to a bare, rusting frame of girders.

This was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, where the region’s goods were proudly displayed and business bustled. Somehow, when the bomb dropped close by it survived, albeit now reduced from its former splendour into a withered skeleton. Post-attack it quickly became reborn as ‘The ‘A Bomb Dome’, a globally recognised symbol of the terror of ‘the bomb’.

Across the river, in the monument-strewn Peace Park, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum left me in no doubt as to the grim reality of nuclear weapons, grimly describing in great detail the events and after effects of the attack.

When Little Boy exploded, some 600 feet above the city, it sent out a shockwave which reduced the city to rubble. Grainy photos show grid-pattern streets, their white dusty lines dividing up the great piles of piles of charred concrete into neat squares. The flattened landscape looks as if a tsunami has hit it, relieved only by the odd blackened tree, defunct telegraph pole or reinforced concrete ruin.

Immediately following the shockwave came extreme heat rays, so hot they melted roof tiles.

Where they met people they left little trace. On part of a building left standing by the blast, one can make out the darkened form of person, sat on the steps of a bank as they waited for it to open. One moment they were here, the next they were gone , instantly vapourised, leaving behind nothing but their shadow, seared into the stone by the heat.

Later that day black rain fell. Thirsty victims, struggling through the levelled streets, drank it out of desperation, seeking to quench their thirst. Where it fell on walls the rain left eerie marks as the radioactive black liquid dribbled to the ground.

As the massive numbers of casualties poured in to whatever makeshift medical facilities could be provided, those doctors that survived became the first medics to witness the gruesome effects of atomic radiation on the human body.

The exhibition stands resembled a house of horror, some pictures too grotesque to bear. Mutilated bodies, unspeakable suffering.

Some say the death toll stands at 200,000. To me it seemed rather pointless, almost ghoulish, to try and establish a precise figure of how may people died that day, or suffered and expired from the effects of radiation in the years after.

Even today, many are still living with the physical and emotional pain. We met one of these ‘hibakushas‘, survivors of the bomb, of which there are some 95,000 still living in Hiroshima.

Mito approached us outside the A-Bomb Dome. A bright and lively chap in his early 60s, he was a four month old foetus in his mother’s womb when the bomb dropped. She was 10km from the hypocentre and so he was spared the physical pain suffered by some many of his fellow citizens.

Now he joins in the efforts to educate the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear weapons, becoming a ‘peace navigator’ and giving up his time in order to engage with and give free tours to Hiroshima’s many visitors.

I found meeting a hibukusha not only very moving but also a frightening jolt of reality. We are living in a nuclear-armed age, characterised by chaos and uncertainty. Speaking to a survivor of a nuclear attack shook me out of my comfortable Western complacency and shattered any lingering illusions I might have had about the need for a nuclear deterrent.

You can try it for yourself and listen to some of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings here.

Aside from the horrific impact of nuclear weapons our visit to Hiroshima provided us with an enlightening insight into the reasons being the atomic bombings.

From books and school lessons I had been informed that dropping the bomb was a necessary evil, an act which may have killed hundreds of thousands of people but saved even more by shortening the war.

Now, learning about things from the other side of the fence the doubts I harboured have turned into fully-fledged scepticism.

Before the bomb was dropped Hiroshima, although of major military significance, was curiously spared the airborne onslaught suffered by other Japanese cities. There is considerable evidence that this was a deliberate policy by the Pentagon, in which Hiroshima, alongside a handful of other Japanese cities, had long been earmarked as a kind of testbed for the US’s new fearful weapon.

Concerned about the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions, and anticipating the arms race of the Cold War, the hawks in the US administration might have been anxious to test it ‘in the field’.

Despite all this, it is strange to witness how strong is the US influence in this country: 'convenience stores', 'parking lots', a major American military presence and, irony of ironies, a baseball stadium standing opposite the A-Bomb Dome.

One thing I am now certain of is that by dropping Little Boy, many of those responsible acheived the direct opposite of what they may have hoped, at least in the long term.

This bomb didn’t end all bombs; instead it created more, ushering in a new era where death and destruction could be wreaked on a far greater scale.

Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be argued to have been the right thing for world peace in the short term, but it was surely disastrous in the longer term.

Hiroshima’s legacy is a frightening dangerous one - a nuclear-armed world, in which the citizens of the countries possessing them have been duped that their nuclear deterrent is the only guarantee of a secure and stable world.

Today these weapons are sought by the warlords and fundamentalists, from Washington and Moscow to North Korea and the Middle East. Ever since the 6th September 1945 the world has never been further from peace and harmony.

I consequently came away from Hiroshima sad at the inhumanity we all seem capable of, and uncomprehending of the apathy in which many of us back in Britain seem to be mired. I felt like a fifteen year old again, all tie-die, Doc Martens, CND badges and hopeless idealism. A hardened peacenik.

It’s encouraging therefore to see that the struggle for a nuke-free world continues, and Hiroshima plays a full part in these efforts. Its citizens seek to educate the rest of the world about the folly of going nuclear, sharing their experiences with people from across the world and never losing the faith that one day there will be a world without nukes.

This is symbolised by the flame of peace, burning in the centre of the Peace Park, a flame which will only be extinguished when the final nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed.

Every time a nuclear weapon is tested the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest, calling on the nation responsible to cease such activity. These go on display in the museum.

I found one addressed to a certain Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, dated as recently as 2006, the same year that our (then) Dear Leader committed the UK to spending up to £20 billion on a replacement for the Trident submarines which currently carry its nuclear missiles.

Walking through the galleries of the Peace Memorial Museum, confronted by the reality of a nuclear attack, it is hard to comprehend such a decision, or even justify the millions spent every year on maintaining the UK’s current ‘deterrent’, each warhead many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But amidst all this madness there is hope. You need only to look at modern Hiroshima to see this: within one year of the attack trees were blossoming; within ten the ground had been cleaned up and the city rebuilt.

Today it is a bustling, attractive home to over one million inhabitants. Despite the horrific events of sixty-odd years ago life has returned.

Back in the Peace Park the flame continues to burn. It might sound trite but surely we all owe it to the people of Hiroshima, who keep it burning, to work together to abolish nukes so that one day soon they have to keep watch over it no more.

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Kyoto's legacy

In the sweltering late summer heat of Kyoto, I was most grateful I had the company of Captain Stag.

But this was no pith-helmeted adventurer, bristling moustache and pink gin at the ready. Rather my companion was a small, zippy Japanese bicycle, and jolly useful he was in covering the city‘s streets in the soup-like heat.

I wasn’t alone in choosing this eco-friendly form of transport to pootle through the little streets, as elderly housewives and smart young businessman whizzed by on their own little two wheelers.

This got me thinking about this great city, its green credentials and those of Japan.

The former imperial capital of Japan and justly famous for its splendid temples (a mere 2,000 or so), Kyoto has more recently become closely associated with a more contemporary issue, namely the global fight against climate change.

Finally waking up to the warnings of climate scientists, in 1997 the world’s leading polluters gathered here, seeking to secure a binding agreement to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The resulting agreement, commonly referred to as the Kyoto Protocol has since then been ratified by over 180 countries, including all developed nations (with the very notable exception of the United States) and Kyoto became a byword for progressive action towards a cleaner, greener future.

A decade on from Kyoto and progress towards the targets set is still painfully slow. Once more Japan is in the lime (or green?) light, having just hosted the annual G8 nations summit, placing climate change high on the agenda.

At the Hokkaido summit the Japanese proudly showed off their spectacular volcanic surroundings to their guests, but what impression did their own record in preserving their natural environment and tackling climate change leave?

Is this crowded country of 120 million leading the world towards an environmentally sustainable future?

Their ambitions are impressive, with (now ex-) Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announcing before the summit a new target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050,
though of course in practice they have a long way to go.

In Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji temple I came across a sign which I though rather neatly reflected the Japanese attitude towards the natural world:

“[Ryoan-ji is] renowned throughout the world as the ultimate example of kare sansi, or ‘my landscape’ style rock garden, in which nature is compressed and given abstract expression within the confines of a very narrow space“.

Can extend this to Japan as a whole?

Japan often seems a country at war with, or at least under siege from, the natural world and its more violent manifestations: typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. And their response, in this mountainous country, appears to build, build, build, on the flat coastal plains they are squeezed into.

To the visitor it can seem like the entire country is made of concrete, passing through gigantic urban centres, like the south of Honshu, where one city seems to merge into another. Here, in the land of ‘salary man’, business is the new emperor and profit is the new creed. Heavy industry scars the coastline and naked development runs riot.

But outside of here, up in the ‘Japanese Alps’ or in the wilds of Hokkaido, it is still possible to lose yourself in the wild. Many Japanese revere these places and great efforts are made to protect them. Here the Shinto emphasis on working harmoniously with nature remains.

When it comes to their relationship with the natural world, perhaps for many Japanese the religious, or spiritual, influences still run deep.

In the zen gardens of Kyoto, the urban dwellers are given an idealised impression, an artificial world where nature is scrubbed-up nature and every blade of grass, every piece of gravel is placed according to how it should be.

Maybe this explains the extraordinary number of zoos and aquariums. Every town, every city we’ve visited seems to proudly boast at least one caged animal-related theme park.

Animals and birds are seen as cute and cuddly, but to be kept at a safe distance, preferably behind bars.

The Japanese are meticulously clean; in the hot summer heat everyone seems to have their own little towels to mop their brows and regularly wipe their hands, and throughout the year people often venture outside wearing surgical masks to prevent infection.

Where foreigners are sometimes feared for their supposedly lax approach towards hygiene, goodness knows what they think of animals.

Their love of nature, their shy curiosity, their tendency towards the artificial, the cellophane-wrapped, the air-conditioned - this all helps to explain the phenomenon of the Japanese tourist.

Left unbounded mass tourism is strangling the very places they love - visitors often complain about the tendency here to build ugly hotels and shops next to beauty spots.

We witnessed this in Toya Ko, with hideous hotels despoiling the natural beauty of Lake Toya and, more recently, at the famous Miyajima, where the Itsukashima temple's famous O-Tori gate, ‘one of the three best views of Japan’ ™, seemingly rises out of the sea - an extraordinary sight.

Were it not for the monumentally ugly line of hotels scarring the hillside directly behind it.

But perhaps the most apparent manifestation of excessive consumption, and the damage this causes, is the incredible amount of waste this country appears to generate.

After a day strolling through a Japanese city, I find myself weighed down with a huge mountain of packaging, simply from visiting a few food outlets.

Everything is sealed in packaging. Often you find yourself struggling with an item of food, from sushi to bananas which, to the Western mind at least seems over-elaborately and excessively wrapped.

It becomes fiendishly difficult to penetrate some wrappers; for example I defy anyone to successively unwrap a triangular rice ball in the manner in which it was designed.

For the budget-restricted traveller you can’t escape the world of 7/11s; individual grocers or other small food shops are scare, and hence you become part of the problem, adding yet more to the 25 billion disposable chopsticks the Japanese throw away every year.

So a lot of work to do then.

But it’s not all green gloom. I’d rather be optimistic about this astonishing nation. The Japanese may do many things to excess but this can bring advantages as well. Take their fantastic public transport system, fully integrated and boasting superfast Shinkansen trains that negate the need to fly.

And consider their incredible postwar economic recovery, which has allowed them to sit firmly amongst the leading industrial nations in the world. Time and again Japan has been looked to be its peers for technological innovations and solutions to the problems posed by a burgeoning world population.

Witness their many inventive answers to the considerable problems posed by dense urban living. Thanks to these their cities, with their huge populations, are civilised, clean and ordered. They work; something we can all learn from.

Japan has woken up to climate change. Like a salaryman after too much Suntory Whisky and Okonomi-Yaki pizza this country is already witnessing the terrible effects of their over-consumption, be it more and devastating extreme weather, the effects of over-fishing or rising oil prices.

They are beginning to realise they have to live within their means. And if any country can do this, Japan can

Rightly or not, our great leaders are pinning their hopes on technology as a way out of climate catastrophe, and we they are going down this route we need Japan, with its wonderful capacity for innovation and resourcefulness at the forefront.

So here’s to future Captain Stags…

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Move any mountain

Mount Usu’s four foot fountain of efficacy of each source is expected to have a soft Leave baking soda fountain is the source of the efficacy neuralgia muscle pain, joint pain, motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been goodneuralgia muscle pain, joint pain motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been good and our YK proud of the valuable real hot springs, of course, 100% multiplied sink heating source, and any injection is not See the analysis at dressing room as detail

I pondered the meaning of these words as I soaked in the steamy, murky depths of our Youth Hostel’s onsen.

Baking soda aside, they certainly seemed to make some kind of sense: fresh from WWOOFing at Takano Farm the healing waters soothed my aching limbs.

Furthermore, I could well understand the locals pride in their extraordinary surroundings, after all not many people can boast of having 100% naturally heated water, free and, quite literally, available on tap.

However, what seemed less certain to me was their nonchalant attitude towards the heating system which bestowed them with this miraculous aqua.

You see, Toya Ko sits on an enormous puddle of liquid hot magma.

There’s nothing particularly unusual here - after all the entire planet’s crust floats on top of the piping hot liquid core - but, unlike in somewhere nice and safe like say, Abingdon or Wantage, in Toya Ko this magma is somewhat closer to the surface.

The town can thank its geological location for this, positioned as it is on a fault line, where the Pacific and American tectonic plates meet, allowing the magma to rise up.

This is all too evident in the enormous volcanoes poking up across the landscape. Toya Ko itself lives in the shadow of a particularly energetic beast, Mount Usu, one of the most active in the whole of this volcanic nation.

Mount Usu has awoken several times and with catastrophic consequences, most recently in 2000.

Living with the constant threat of being showered with molten hot rocks and shaken by earthquakes, was the volcanic nature of their environment a blessing or a curse to Toya Ko’s residents?

The ones we talked to didn’t seem too concerned. One chap, keen to practice his English, had lived here for 40 years and witnessed both the 2000 eruption and the one preceeding it, in 1977. Did he live in fear? He just shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

Bravado or not, if it wasn’t for the hot springs this place wouldn’t be home to the numerous massive hotels blighting the lakefront, their guests wandering the streets in ill-fitting kimonos in between their hot dips.

And without the smoking volcanoes the roads would be empty of the fleets of luxury tourist buses ploughing the highway up to the cable car station and views over the brooding craters.

However, this natural phenomena has its flip-side. The threat of a apocalyptic natural disaster can be a big turn-off for many a potential house buyer. Unlike in Highgate High Street, estate agents in Toya Ko seemed rather thin on the ground.

And even if one were able to forget the showers of flying pumice, rivers of molten lava, cascades of hot mud and clouds of ash the evidence of previous disasters lies all around.

After visiting the new volcano visitor centre, home to ash-coated vehicles, buckled railway tracks and lots of mind-boggling information about ‘pyroclastic flows’ and ‘lava domes’, one can step outside and see for oneself the devastation a volcano is capable of.

The appropriately-named ‘Konpira Crater - Remnants of the disaster walking trail’ features an abandoned part of the town, where buildings devastated in the 2000 eruption have been left in the state they were found in.

A new crater was created in Mount Konpira and from there hot water turned into a river of hot mud, gushing down the hillside and into the hot springs district.

An apartment block stands between dead trees, its first floor buried, its roof pockmarked by falling rocks .

A former bathhouse stands abandoned, its doors caved in, windows smashed, furniture poking up out of the piles of mud which built up in the rooms inside.

Nearby, a large steel bridge lies at a bizarre angle, its girders poking up, streetlamps twisted against the ground underneath; ripped away from the highway and swept along on a river of mud to its final resting place.

A little further up the hillside the highway which once linked the town with the outside world is kinked and twisted, its tarmac rising up at grotesque angles before running into the grass and ending abruptly, a highway to nowhere.

Even closer to home for us, rising behind our hostel, Mount Showa Shinzan broods menacingly, its summit seared of vegetation, steam pouring out of vents.

This ‘parasite volcano’ only appeared in 1943, growing up out of a corn field, sometimes at a rate of up to 1.5 metres a day.

Thanks to the efforts of the local postmaster, a Mr Masao Mimatsu, this wonder of nature was recorded in great detail, the first time such an event had ever been recorded .

The enterprising Mr Mimatsu also bought the land on which the volcano appeared, thereby preserving the new natural wonder for future generations and protecting it from the Japanese tendency to build ugly great hotels and shopping precincts selling useless toot right next door.

Sadly elsewhere in the area developers were able to get there first. Above Lake Toya itself, a beautiful 11km-wide caldera formed by volcanic activity, the hideous silhouette of the Windsor Hotel stands out starkly against the horizon.

Incidentally, why do people insist on calling hotels worldwide by this name? Perhaps they find Saxe-Coburg-Gotha rather a mouthful and it leads to all sorts of confusion with cabbies.

In July this venue played host to the G8 summit, an event so monumental that we weren’t even aware of its location until we stepped off at the train station. I guess no-one noticed the extra hot air here.

Whatever progress they made on tackling climate change or reducing their golf handicap I do hope George, Gordon, Nicola and co had time to try out Toya Ko’s many free on-street hot baths.

These mini-onsen cater for passing pedestrians, offering them a chance to bathe their hands or feet. There’s something very zen-like about sitting in a small bandstand, in the rain, with one’s feet in hot water.

Back in the proper onsen, my skin is turning pink and my are fingers beginning to resemble those strange pickled apricots the Japanese consider a delicacy. Yes, living by a volcano does have its benefits.

I’m still puzzled by the baking soda though.

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Ah onsen!

The onsen is a marvellous place to reflect. Sitting in a hot taupe bath of mineral water that has come straight from the heart of a volcano you can’t help but think, ‘Damn I’m a lucky bastard!’

Hokkaido, Japan, is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful parts of the world. Lake Toya, a caldera lake in Shikotsu-Toya National Park, is surrounded by volcanoes and nurtures a cluster of small, fluffy, forested, conical islands. This is somewhere that would be a challenge to get to by flying. This is somewhere that we have travelled 10,600 miles by land and sea to find. However, unknown to us before arrival, this small town was also discovered earlier this year by the G8 leaders as they met for their annual summit. I wonder if Brown, Bush and Sarkozy swapped their keks for kimonos and slipped into the steaming waters of an onsen together. In Japan there is a phrase for the way people speak to one another in the onsen - Hadaka-No-Tukiai - or Naked Communication. Perhaps the healing effects of the watery sulphur, calcium and iron combination will have helped them right some of their wrongs. I haven’t seen a British broadsheet for some time, but I somehow doubt it. Nevertheless, the waters have been very good to me, helping ease away the aches and pains from picking and packing tonnes of sweetcorn and potatoes on a Japanese mountain farm.

Onsen etiquette is somewhat complex: wash before bathing, no towels in the bath expect for on your head to prevent fainting and don’t shower standing up. Despite following the rules carefully, there was very little Hadaka-No-Tukiai, or any kind of communication infact, between me and the locals. So instead I watched the mountains in the lake drift in and out of cloud. The piping hot onsen water is a result of volcanic activity, the most recent of which was just eight years ago. Yet people still live here and tourists still visit. The draw of the onsen is just too great to deter human beings, although the crushed cars, tangled power lines and lava flooded road we passed on the bus are a stark reminder of the volatile ground we are treading.

There’s something deep in that, but at a certain point in the soaking process the heat and minerals turn reflection into relaxation and all you can think is ‘Ah onsen!’

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