Summer Vacation in Tohoku

So aside from my short trip to Tokyo around New Year's and the day trip to Yamadera last fall, I haven't really done much traveling here. It seems small compared to the US, but the distances between attractions is still large and most trips would require an extended vacation. There are a few interesting things in daytrip or weekend trip range, but even then the travel time would be annoyingly long for the amount of time spent at the actual destination, and I like just spending the weekend relaxing, after catching up on various chores and errands that have built up during the week.

So now that summer vacation is here and I can take time off without skipping classes, I finally had my chance to do some traveling. Since it's the hot summer, I figured I would avoid the heat that would come with attractions further south and stay here up north. Even before I got accepted to the program, and even before I applied for it, I had already been planning a two week long trip that I would be taking sometime soon, spending a week in the Tokyo area, and a week up here in Tohoku. So I executed part of the Tokyo plans over my New Year's trip, and now I could execute the Tohoku plans I already had drawn up.

It was a conglomeration of pretty much unrelated things that just happened to all be nearby each other and so make for a good integrated trip. I had heard of the Cat Island way back in college somehow, and one of the Three Views of Japan, Matsushima, was right next door. A bit south of that is the Fox Village. It's a long story of how I got interested in the Semboku area, but the famous Nyuto Onsen, Lake Tazawa, the samurai houses of Kakunodate, and a few good mountains, including Akita Komagatake, were all right next to each other, so all together it would make for a full trip over a rather small area.

Well, in the end the Fox Village was a bit too out of the way and the extra travel would have taken too much time from Matsushima, so I had to skip it for now, but in the end my plans were: three hour drive across the entire island to Matsushima, spending the whole day there. Next day, the short drive to Ishinomaki, where I would catch the ferry to the cat island, Tashirojima, and spend a few hours there before catching the ferry back and driving to Kakunodate. Then the next day half in Kakunodate and half around Lake Tazawa before spending the night at Nyuto. And the last day climbing Komagatake and driving home afterwards.

So I left the house at 8am on Thursday  and got on the highway. I still don't know all the details of the Japanese highway system, but there seems to be a relatively small network of toll highways that are similar to the US Interstate system, and a more extensive system of car-only roads that may or may not be toll roads, aside from the regular country roads that have to be made do with when there's no highway around.

So my trip started out south on Route 7, which is the major road that goes through my town, and after a short while turned onto a car-only highway with a 100 yen entrance toll. This highway, like most of them here, was only one lane in each direction, and no median between opposing traffic, but just a series of poles and small bumpers along the center line to separate the traffic. The onramps have only a very short lane before traffic merges, and although the highways do occasionally open up to two lanes for cars to pass, it's only for a very short distance, only enough to have time to pass one or two vehicles before it narrows down again. The speed limit is usually posted as 70 (km/h), but almost no one obeys it and 90-100 is common if there's no slower traffic and the road is straight enough for that speed to be safe. Occasionally the posted limit would even be as low as 50. And also, the speed limit signs are all digital, on on the other occasions I've taken the highway near here, I've noticed it does vary a little at different times, though I'm not sure if it's based on time of day, or weather, or what.

So most of the trip across the island was on roads like this, some toll, some not, although near the end I merged onto the main Tohoku Expressway that runs north from Tokyo, which was always 2 lanes in each direction, usually had a median, and the speed limit was 80-100. The very first highway with the 100 yen entrance fee just had an automated collection machine you threw your toll into, but all the others had a machine you took a ticket from, then gave it to the agent when you exited and they told you the toll. There were a couple tolls between 400~600 yen, but on the big highway the final toll by the time I exited was about 2500 yen. These are common toll rates here, and I imagine that the tolls here actually cover the cost of the highways, unlike in the US where they're usually just a small supplement to the budget which is mostly paid for by general taxes.

One of the other big differences between US and Japanese highways is that with Japan being so mountainous, there are loads of viaducts and tunnels, most of them fairly short, but some quite long. In the US on the few occasions when a road needs to intercept a hill, they just cut a slice out of the hill rather than use a tunnel. And then going along with being so mountainous, and the fact that I crossed the whole island, there were times when I'd be going gently uphill for quite a while, and after finally reaching the crest and coming down the other side, I'd sometimes be able to coast without applying any gas for many minutes.

So between that main highway and a branch of it going off to Sendai (the biggest city in Tohoku and right next to Matsushima), I finished off my trip and got to Matsushima at about 11am.

I was wondering what the parking situation was going to be like, but there was a lot right there as I was coming into town, so that was taken care of. I had booked a cruise of the bay for noon, so I went over to their docks right across the street and picked up my ticket that I had reserved online at the ticket window. I still had time before the cruise left, so I took the opportunity to get my souvenir shopping out of the way and popped into one of the many souvenir shops lining the street and got that done. It took just enough time that I got back to the docks to board the boat without having to do any waiting around.

The cruise was 50 minutes long and they did a little talking over the PA about some of the islands we went by, although I didn't catch most of it between the boat noise, the other people talking amongst themselves, and just my (lack of) listening ability.

Notice the long footbridge in the distance.

Along with the cruise ticket, it came with two other tickets, one for a free kamaboko that you grill yourself, and one for a free grilled oyster at the Date Masamune museum, so after the cruise I wandered down the main road and stopped by anything interesting that I saw, so the first was my grilled kamaboko.

Next was a little walk through the main temple complex in town, and along some of the back streets.

Part of the temple complex.

This wasn't even part of the temple it didn't look like, but just some other private land.

Advertisements for the Ikeda Shuzo exhibit in Sendai. Since he's from my town I see these all the time, but it was weird to see them on the other side of the country.

Just someone's backyard.

There was a tower in the middle of town that looked like it had a great view, and I eventually found out how to get to it. It turns out it was built just for the view and had a small entrance fee, but I paid and went up.

From the back of the tower.

And from the front.

After that I went across the street to a small temple on one of the little islands near the shore.

A shot of it from the cruise boat.

There was a Chinese tour group here.

The little channel separating the island from the mainland.

I assume it floods at high tide.

Then I went over to the Date Masamune museum and went through that, and got my grilled oyster afterwards. They had an English guidebook, and about half of the displays had English translations, so I was impressed at that. Half of the first floor was mostly a bunch of wax figures of famous Japanese people who were born in Tohoku, including Shirase Nobu, who I already knew because he was born in the town right next door to mine. Then the rest of the museum was a bunch of small, life-sized dioramas of Masamune's life. It was an interesting way to kill a little time.

After that I went back across the street to cross that giant bridge you can see in some of the pictures above. The island on the other side was actually a lot bigger than it looked and I spent a good hour walking all over it.

So there's four mountaintops surrounding the bay that are known as the Four Great Views of Matsushima, so I wanted to get the views from at least a couple of them. It was getting later in the day, so I didn't have time for all of them, but I managed to fit the middle two in.

From Ougidani on Mt. Soukan, the Enchanting View.

From Tomiyama, the Beautiful View.

The temple on top of Tomiyama.

After the views, I wanted to fill up on gas just to make sure I had enough for the short drive tomorrow, but all the stations I had passed on the way were self-serve, which I had never tried yet in Japan as full-serve stations are still very common, and probably even in the majority. So I stopped and gave it a shot, but the machine thwarted me right away trying to give me some point card or something I didn't want, so the attendant came over and got me past that screen and I pumped my first gas in Japan.

Then I headed back into town and checked into my hotel on the bayside with a nice view out the window.

My package didn't include dinner here, so I went back into town to look for something. The main tourist drag was COMPLETELY DEAD. All the food shops that were bustling with tourists earlier were shut up, but I did manage to find a place that was open that specialized in... cow tongue. I had seen something about the cow tongue before, I guess maybe it's the regional specialty, but I had dog in Korea, so cow tongue wouldn't be a big deal. They had a "spicy" curry on the menu which I got, which was very spicy by Japanese standards, so about a medium by Western standards. It was good though, and came with a salad which had a couple slices of bacon-like meat in it, which I assume were also cow tongue. It was all pretty good.

So back at the hotel, the room had no bath, but just the communal bath downstairs, so I plucked up my courage to use one of those for only the second time (the first time being when I stayed in the capsule hotel in Tokyo). It wasn't so bad, there were only a couple of other people there, and there was an outdoor bath too, so that was neat.

Friday was Tashirojima, a.k.a. Cat Island. There were only a few ferries that went in each direction each day, the first one at 9am, and it was about a 40 minute drive from Matsushima, so I had to start the day a little early to make it there on time. The route that Google took me through Ishinomaki was through the desolate coastal industrial region which looked like it still hadn't much rebuilt since the tsunami. By the way, this city, Ishinomaki, was the absolute hardest hit by the tsunami, which took out about a third of it and flooded the rest. And the islands served by the ferry and the peninsula they're off of are the closest points of land to the epicenter, with one of the two Tashirojima ports still being closed and repaired six years later.

So the final stretch of the drive took me through just some disrepaired "roads" with just empty industrial lots all around that just looked like I was driving aimlessly through a giant construction site, but I did find the "parking lot" I was looking for right where it was supposed to be, with signs pointing to the ferry office winding between chain-link fences around other vacant lots.

There were a reasonable number of cars in the lot, and lots of people milling around outside of the ferry office waiting for the boat to launch. There was a lot of Cat Island stuff around so the whole thing was more popular than I was thinking it was. I got my tickets and picked up a little flyer with a map of some of the island's attractions on it and waited for the boat to board with everyone else.

It was an uneventful trip, about 50 minutes, and we landed at the port at Tashirojima.

Cats hanging around near the docks.

Left for lots of cats, right for not so many cats.

These construction barriers are usually animal themed in Japan, so of course the ones here were cats.

When I had checked online it seemed that the next ferry to leave would be around 2pm, but the map that I had grabbed said there was one at noon. I had planned on spending the extra time just wandering around the island, but now that I was here it was clear there really wasn't that much to do, and it would be nice to get into Kakunodate a little earlier than I had been planning, so I decided to just make the quick round of the sights and get back on the twelve o'clock ferry.

So while most people headed straight out to the cat shrine, I veered off and decided to visit what was called "Manga Island" first, which was the name of the collection of cat-shaped cottages that were built for overnight visitors. I had actually wanted to come to the island the evening after Matsushima and stay in one of them, but for some reason that wasn't made entirely clear, I guess that the owner just didn't have the time or something, they weren't currently being rented out. But I still got to get all my pictures of them at least.

The central lodge.

After this I meandered up towards the cat shrine, taking in the sights along the way. The island had almost a tropical feel to it with the heat and humidity, and the plants that were around.

Cat under a truck.

Cat trinkets in front of someone's house.

The path and gateway to an abandoned shrine.

The abandoned shine building.

The main island shrine.

View from a hill.

A little mini shrine along the road, but there was a giant spider web right in front of it, so I didn't get a closeup.

Cat

Cat

Cats

Cats

Cat

The gate of the old elementary school, from when there were actually children living here.

The site of the school.

Giant lilies.

Cat themed warning message.

Eventually I came across the "shima no eki" (island station). Rest stops on the highways here are called "michi no eki" (road stations), and on the trip to Yamadera we had seen one on a river side which called itself a "kawa no eki" (river station), so this was the sole tourist outlet on the island and the only place which served any kind of food. On the way back from the cat shrine I stopped inside and bought some shaved ice.

Island Station: Kitty Republic

Cat themed things around the entrance.

The one little building in the back is the whole thing.

A history of the schools on the island, since this place is on their old site. The elementary and middle schools closed about thirty years ago.

And just a bit further down the road was the cat shrine.

So then I just snapped a few pictures on the way back to the docks and stopped by the island station for shaved ice like I said. There was an Australian tourist there that I talked to for a bit too, who had been living in Tokyo for nine years. Also, there was an English booklet of tourist attractions in Ishinomaki, so since I was leaving the island earlier than expected, I figured I'd take one and see if there was anything else I could quickly see before leaving for Kakunodate.

Someone was feeding bread to the seagulls as we drove away:

Goodbye, Cat Island.

So I read the booklet on the way back and found a couple interesting things. There was a little tsunami and rebuilding museum downtown, and right next door an interesting little market where I could get lunch. There was also a museum of Date Masamune's expedition to Europe with a full-scale replica of his ship nearby, but it was just a little too far out of the way for me to have time to go to it, so I had to pass. But I headed downtown and visited the museum, which actually had a British guy on staff there that gave me a bunch of English materials to help interpret everything that was in Japanese. It was really just a tiny building with some photo displays showing things before the tsunami, a history of other tsunamis that had hit, photos of the tsunami damage itself, statistics of the damage compared to elsewhere in Japan, and the plans for rebuilding. It was interesting.

The little marketplace next door was just a collection of food trucks or shipping containers or random improvised food stands like that which looked like they could have been set up right after the tsunami as a way for the town to start getting back on its feet. There were posters for art and music and movie festivals all around and the whole thing had a very bohemian atmosphere to it; it was pretty cool. I bought a panini for lunch and chatted a little with the guy manning the stall, who was about my age or a little younger, and then got back on the road after lunch.

So another drive back across most of the island, pretty much the same as the first, and got to my little boutiquish hotel in the countryside just outside of Kakunodate. I had dinner included at this place, and once again a room with no bath, so another communal bath before heading to bed.

View from my room. Matsushima had a nicer view.

So Saturday morning after breakfast I drove into Kakunodate and spent the morning visiting the samurai houses. First I stopped at the information center near the train station to pick up an English map of the houses open for viewing and other attractions in the same area before heading over to the samurai street. It's basically only this one long street that the houses are all still lining, although there are a few other houses around town that have been converted into various shops. Many of these are still privately owned and still function as normal houses, but a few are open to the public to tour for free, and there are a few others that are open for a fee. The free ones were basically just empty houses that you could stand outside of and look in the open doors or walk through the hallways, but not in the actual rooms. The rooms themselves then were just tatami floors with no furniture or anything, but occasionally an irori hearth. And the rest of the grounds would sometimes have nice gardens or a storehouse or well or some other little building. One of them did have a little museum with things like a couple of wedding kimonos and old swords and some pottery and laquerware.

The samurai house street.

One of them had actually been converted into a Tenrikyo church.

There was also a small samurai house museum listed on the map that I went to. It looked like it was all shut up, but while I was standing in front of it reading the Japanese sign a woman came over from the shop next door and manned the admissions window for long enough to sell me a ticket before telling me to take my time and going back to the other shop. This museum had a bunch of stuff in it, up to even an old palanquin, but it felt more like just someone's private hobby collection of stuff laid out for other people to see, and not particularly well upkept at that. Between the unstaffed window and the interior, I got the feeling that it must have belonged to some guy who did it as a retirement hobby and had since died, and now his kids were running it just for some side income without having much of a particular interest in it. Too bad, because it could have been fairly decent if it was cleaned up a little and run a bit more professionally.

Also on the tourist map was listed an art gallery tucked away just a little bit off from the samurai houses. It didn't say what kind of art, but I figured it would be cheap and I had nothing better to do, so I would give it a shot. It turns out that this was someone's hobby collection that was on display too, but this time of glassworks by Lalique. Sort of a random find to be tucked away in a small Japanese town among old samurai houses, but it was interesting, and a pretty good collection and really well-displayed for just a hobbyist who couldn't have been that well-off.

Then the last place I went was one of the non-free houses called the Aoyagi house. This one was an impressively large ground on the inside for being tucked onto this one block of town, and had a bunch of large buildings, a pamphlet in English, and all sorts of exhibits, like an armory, an exhibit related to the first work of anatomy produced in Japan (from a Dutch work), and various random family collections, like clocks, cameras, and gramophones. This was definitely the best one to visit for size and content, and only cost about five bucks too.

I had wanted to climb the hill in the nearby park, and there was supposed to be some castle ruins right nearby too, but I was running a little behind schedule at this point, so I had to skip them. Instead I went off to lunch a little bit north of town to a place called Kimoto Garden Cafe and Delicatessan. I had heard of this place somehow ages ago when I first started looking at the things in this area and so had always had it on my list of places to visit. It's just a cute little cafe out in the countryside that serves dishes with fresh seasonal vegetables that they grow in their own garden. I got the lunch set that came with a bunch of little servings of different dishes, most of which had hints of Italian to them, and as expected it was great.

After that I headed off to Lake Tazawa. First, on the western side of the lake was the famous Tatsuko statue and a little shrine, but not much else other than a few little shops. Then I headed over to the eastern side, which had a beach, a pleasure boat cruise, paddleboat rentals, and a sort of shopping plaza with souvenir shops, among other things. What I had really wanted to do was to rent a bike and bike around the whole lake, but it was supposed to take about two hours, and I really didn't have time for it, so I settled with just walking down the sidewalk along the beach and back before heading out to my accommodations for the night.

Tonight I was staying at the famous Nyuto Onsen Village, which is a collection of hot springs and their associated inns. The most famous of them is Tsuru no Yu, but it's so popular that reservations are necessary far in advance of when I started planning this trip. In fact, by the time I got around to booking hotels for this trip, it was only about a week before the actual trip, so there was only one inn left with openings that could be booked online: Magoroku. This one actually looked pretty cool though, because it's the deepest in the mountains of all of them, and the road doesn't even go to the doorstep of the inn, but ends on one side of the river, and you have to cross a long footbridge to the other side of the river to get to it.

So the road into the region is a normal paved road past the first couple inns. The road to Tsuru no Yu branches off early, and later the road splits in two heading towards the remaining sets of inns. The road I was on ended at the parking lot of one of them, and after continuing through this parking lot there was a smaller, once-paved road in the back leading to the remaining two inns. I say "once-paved" because while it was paved, it was in pretty terrible condition and might as well have been a dirt or gravel road. This road was only wide enough for one car pretty much, although there were wider portions often enough for when cars actually had to pass each other. Because this road was so narrow it was all covered by the shade of the trees, and it was fairly winding, and often went up or down at a fairly steep grade. I didn't pass any other cars going in though, and after arriving at the parking lot of the penultimate inn, the final road down to the "parking lot" of Magoroku was a quite steep road leading right up to the edge of the small river gorge. I was actually kind of worried going down it if my little kei car would have the power to get back up it and out when it came time to leave. And I put "parking lot" in quotes, because it was really just the shoulder at the end of the road right up against the cliffside I had just come down from.

From the opposite side of the complex.

 
Check-in was supposed to be only until five, which is why I was a little pressed for time and had to get here early. So I collected my bags and crossed the river and looked among the buildings for the main office, which was not really marked at all, but I found it and got checked in. There were a man and a woman at the desk and as the guy checked me in the woman was asking where I was from and if I knew the old ALT from that city who was leaving and if I knew the new person who would be taking his place. Actually, while I was at Kimoto one of the women there was asking me the exact same thing, so I don't know if they had just read about the switchup in their town newsletter recently, or if the guy had actually come around to these places and knew these people. Anyway, after the check-in I got the place described to me and got taken to my room, which was super tiny (only four and a half mats, or about 9'x9').

Dinner wasn't until five thirty, so I had some time to kill, and among the couple papers on the table about the hotel was a map of the trails around the inns and up to Mount Nyuto that the area was named after, and there was actually a fairly short-looking trail running from here to the inn at the end of the other road that had branched off, so I thought it would be a nice hike and I'd get to see some of the other inns, so I headed out. The path that came across the footbridge headed through the grounds of the inn and actually became a small gravel road that went past a couple of outbuildings in the back, one of which sounded like it hosted a generator which was providing electricity for the place. So then it continued along the river and on over a tiny stream that joined up to the river and eventually there was a chain across the road and shortly after that it met up with the parking lot of the inn other inn. It didn't seem like there was any reason that this road couldn't be used by the guests at my inn and a small parking lot built at the end of it, but maybe there wouldn't be room for a large enough parking lot, or they just liked the ambiance of the final footbridge leading up to the inn, which was nice, but might be annoying if you had a lot of luggage.

Also along the path was some partially buried pipes carrying water in some direction. At a couple points along the roads and paths you could smell the sulfur of the springs and it seemed like maybe there were just a couple springs that the water for multiple inns was distributed out of, but it was impossible to tell the details.

So after reaching the other inn, it wasn't far along the road to see the other inns in the area, so I walked along it and got some looks at them too before turning back and returning to my inn and having dinner. (By the way, dinner at all these hotels/inns I was staying at was huge and I could barely eat it all.) Included with dinner for me especially and no one else was a little bottle of sake, which for some reason they were giving me for having booked online. I'm not complaining.

Ganiba Onsen

Okama Onsen

Okama again

Tae no Yu Onsen

Tae no Yu again

Now most (all?) of the inns in Nyuto, contrary to more modern facilities, have mixed gender baths (and some of them gender separated ones as well), but the mixed baths here were women-only from 7 to 8:30 for those women who wanted to experience all the different baths, but didn't want to risk bathing with any guys, so I had to chill in the room for a bit and wait that out before going to bathe. (There was an indoor men's bath I could have used, but of course I wanted to use the outdoor ones, which were all mixed.)

Now the other two hotels had been different in a few respects. For one, all the baths were connected to the hotels, and even the outdoor ones were reached by just a simple door from the indoor baths. Two, after getting undressed in the changing room and moving into the bath room, there are a set of washing stations along one wall, because you have to wash before entering the clean bath water. And third, they all provided towels in the room. This place did provide a wash towel in a plastic carrying bag like the other places, but no drying towel, so I figured the towels were probably provided in the bathhouses instead. So I undressed in my room and put on the provided yukata and got together my comb and a change of underwear (I guess it's up to the person whether or not you bother to wear any underwear under the yukata or not, but the internet seems to say that it's more common than not), and headed outside to the baths.

Since the baths were outside they had some rubber outdoor slippers at the front door, and there was no one else there when I got there. There was the changing room, and then just the bath. No towels and not even any washing stations. Welp, so I went all the way back in and got my towel and came back out and checked the other bath, the indoor one. Same deal, no towels and no washing stations. But at the far end of the bath you could see the wooden flooring discolored by water and a couple of water basins sitting there next to some bottles of soap and shampoo. I shouldn't have been surprised, but this was one of those really old-fashioned onsen where you just scoop water from the bath and scrub down right there next to it. Still no sign of towels though. I don't know if they just forgot to put one in my room or if we were just expected to dry off with the washing towel, which you usually do anyway before going back into the changing room so you don't drip water all over the floor, but either way, this time I had bought my own.

So anyway, modesty safe from strangers, I squatted down next to the bath and scrubbed down and rinsed off and soaked in this little indoor bath for a couple minutes before drying off and suiting back up and going over to the other bath. By this time though someone else had arrived just ahead of me, a guy and his wife or girlfriend, going to the outdoor bath themselves. Well, I felt kind of bad for intruding on their maybe-supposed-to-be-romantic outdoor bath together, but so it goes, I still wanted to use the outdoor bath too. Luckily there were two of the outdoor baths, so I left them to the one and turned my back to them in the other in hopes to not disturb them too much, but it was only a few seconds before the guy comes over and says, hey, the stars are amazing, come over here and look! Well, I guess they had no problem with someone else being in there with them, so I joined them and we talked a little and when some other guy came out he invited him over too.

Usually I wouldn't wear my glasses in the bath because: 1) they'd just get steamed up anyway, and 2) that just makes it look like you're trying to see something, and there's usually nothing special to see, so it might come off as kind of pervy. But since it was an outdoor bath there would be the outdoors to see, so I had worn them. As it turns out though, it was pretty dark, there weren't many outdoor lights around the inn or the bath area, so there wasn't much to see in the distance like I thought there might be, but the guy was absolutely right, the stars were amazing, and even though I only stayed out there for about ten minutes, I got to see a pretty decent-sized shooting star too.

So the Nyuto Onsen were pretty cool and I'll have to make a reservation ahead of time at some point and check out Tsuru no Yu, which seems like it'd be a pretty cool place to go in the winter. So I went to bed a little early and got up a little early as breakfast was served early and just before I left the dining room the serving lady asked me where I was going from here and I told her Komagatake, and she gave me a little sandwich to take on the trail, which was super nice of them, and also nice because I had forgotten to buy anything for today's lunch the day before like I had intended. So I checked out and managed to get my little kei car up the cliffside again without any trouble, and headed just down the road a bit to some kind of combination lodge/onsen, where the buses to the trailhead left from, since the trailhead parking lot was apparently too small for the weekend crowds and closed to private vehicles on the weekends.

The mountain.

The weather seemed pretty clear, no rain and not many clouds, so I took the bus up and started off on the trail. I had downloaded a map of the trail loop to my phone so I knew where to go and what all the trail signs were pointing towards, and there were times on the map too, and it seemed like the whole loop would only take a couple hours, after which I would head back home from here. Well, don't you know not long after starting up the trail I got to a region where the clouds started coming in, so it wasn't looking like I'd be getting any nice views from the top, same as when I had climbed Chokai last year. But the fog wasn't too thick, so I could still see the nice views just off the trail, and it was flower season, so there were lots of nice flowers all over.

Like Chokai, there were a couple of different peaks on this mountain. There was a set of three named the Male Peak (Odake, 男岳), the Female Peak (Medake, 女岳), and the main one called the Male Female Peak (Onamedake, 男女岳). The trail loop went to the Male Peak and the main peak, but not the Female one, and there was one other peak, Yakemori, listed on the return path. So the path was pretty easy around the first half of the loop and I got to the first set of crossroads where the short path to Odake split off and headed off that way. The climb was a little steep, but not too bad. There was a little torii set up and a bunch of interesting plaque type things with things written on them where it looked like they were put up here for good luck in people's various endeavors. So after admiring all that for a bit I went back to the crossroads, which then went down and around the little pond that was up there, but before going down there I saw a sign for the other minor peak, Medake, despite there not being a trail listed for it on the map I was using. Well, I thought it would be nice to visit all three, so I headed on over.

Some kind of volcanic outcropping.

The base camp.

A peek at Lake Tazawa.

There were boardwalks along parts of the trail.

The peak of Odate.

This trail started off going very steeply down into a valley between two ridges, so already I was dreading having to come back up it when I was done. And it was going down quite a ways before finally leveling off. Then it turned right and went gently down through the valley for a while. I saw a sign on the trail for another destination, but no more signs for Medake, and from what I could see ahead it looked like the trail just kept going down this valley without any peak in sight that could be Medake. So I pulled out my phone and checked Google Maps (luckily I was getting reception out here) and it showed Medake to my left, probably on top of that ridge, but I still wasn't seeing any trail over there. The trail I was on looked like it could maybe turn to the left around the foot of the ridge and then maybe there could be a trail up from there, but that was still a ways further down and I didn't want to make that whole hike for just a chance that the trail could be there.

I googled for more Komagatake trails, but didn't find any trails to its summit on any of the maps I could find, so I decided it was best to just not waste any more time and energy and head back. So just as I was coming back to the steep portion, some other people came along (not being the main trail, there was no one else on this trail), so I figured that if they were on this more minor trail, they probably knew where it was supposed to go, so I asked them about Medake. It turns out there really isn't a well-defined trail to it, but it was up that ridge off to the left, and pretty much you just had to climb the ridge without any particular trail, although there was at one point a pole stuck in the ground in the distance that they pointed out that I could use as a starting point (they were actually taking some different path up to Odake).

So I started scaling the ridge and once getting over there I could see a little wear going up the ridge that made a sort-of path, and eventually got up to the top of the ridge. After that it went fairly flatly for just a little bit further (and I was checking Google Maps to make sure I was heading in the right direction) and eventually I made it to the Medake summit.

This one was really cool, because it was a very well-defined crater running in a circle that I could just barely make out the other side of through the cloud fog. The whole thing reminded me of a smaller version of the crater with the sacred cave in Kimi no Na wa. I also wondered of the name of the male peak came from it just being a straight pointy peak, and the female peak's name from it being a crater with a depression in the middle, like certain body parts. So anyway, after catching my breath and admiring that for a few minutes, I headed back towards the main path.

A crag in the fog.

The valley between Odake and Medake.

Back the way I came from.

The Medake side of the valley on the left.

The Odake side of the valley on the right.

Giant rocks at the bottom of the slope.

On the way up Medake. Everything was covered in this thick moss.

The "path" to Medake.

The super cool crater of Medake. The picture does it no justice.

The peak of Medake.

Or the three peaks of Medake. It's like people were competing to build the highest peak.

Like I knew it would be, it was a tough climb back up, but after getting about halfway up, I was starting to have doubts that this was the same path that I had come down. Eventually I came across a feature that I didn't recognize but was sure I would have noticed on the way down. Well, I was already halfway up and there was no way I was going to climb all the way back down to just climb right back up again, so even though I didn't know exactly where this trail came out, I wasn't lost, because I knew it was headed in at least the right general direction, and it couldn't go up forever, so the worst case was just that when I got to the top I would find that I climbed too high and have to go back down to my original trail.

A neat dew-covered spiderweb on the way back up.

Well, that's exactly what happened, because just as I was getting towards the top of the ridge I saw a familiar torii peek over the edge, and sure enough I had come back to Odake from behind! Well, at least I was back up and knew where I was now, and it wasn't far back to the main trail. Once I got back to the crossroads I took a much needed rest and ate the little sandwich that I got at the onsen. I was happy though, because I got to go somewhere off the beaten path that other people don't usually go to.

So once I finally got rested back up I headed down the trail past the pond towards the main peak. This pond was pretty eerie. It was very shallow and fairly narrow, but long, and between the fog and the ground on the shore of it having no plants, but just volcanic gravel, the whole thing felt like some prehistoric scene, like this could have been the place where the first fish climbed out of the water to become the first reptile.

The shores of the pond.

So I followed the boardwalk along the pond until it broke off to the left for the trail up to the main peak, Onamedake, and started up the path. I was still a bit tired from my Medake adventure, but eventually made it up.

This peak was relatively anticlimactic compared to the other two. The only thing on top of it was a rock pile with a marker, and with the clouds there was no great view or anything. Both Odake and Medake had been more interesting. So after just a minute up there I turned and headed back to the main trail.

The trail up to Onamedake.

The highest peak of Komagatake.

A nice view of the pond coming back down from the peak.

Now all that was left was the trail back to the base camp, and it wasn't a terribly long or hard hike. Along the way it passed over another peak, Yakemori, which was interesting because it was just a moonscape-like pile of gravel, and then towards the end the path descended a bit more steeply and eventually arrived back at the camp just as a bus was leaving. So I had to sit around for about forty-five minutes waiting for the next bus, but eventually got back to the lodge and my car.

A look back at the pond and huts.

It looks like this is snow?

Minor peak Yokodake.

Pond, huts, and snow off in the distance.

The path up to Yakemori.

The gravel mound that is Yakemori.

The peak of Yakemori.

The path back down to the base camp.

A nice view of Lake Tazawa from the lodge/onsen parking lot.

The drive home was supposed to be about two hours, and would have been uneventful except that the main road was closed for construction halfway there, so I had to take slow backroads which probably added an hour to the trip. Oh, and halfway back I stopped in a little random town to visit this: