Conspiring With Him How to Load and Bless

November in Japan is a lonely, depressing month.  The bright colors of fall have peaked and gradually turn to brown.  It is still too early to ski, and Christmas vacation remains over a month away.  The weather is too cold to play outside, but not cold enough to play outside in the snow.  Days end at 4:30.  And there is no football.  Or Thanksgiving.   

To alleviate periodic episodes of anomie, I turn to the rustic luxuries of onsening and the harvest.  

An onsen is a Japanese hot spring resort.  Unlike western hot springs, onsens are not simply muddy holes in the ground, but carefully decorated and managed pools of varying size, shape, and material.  They are often deep in the mountains, or at least on the outskirts of civilization.  Fukushima being a rural urban center, I live at the confluence of several onsen resorts and often visit one if I have a free half-day.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to a modern hotel which sported a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a traditional indoor bath, an outdoor bath called a rotenburo, and a sauna.  No one else was swimming in the pool, and the afternoon sun reflecting off the peak fall foliage on the other side of the river behind the resort shone through floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the slightly broken surface of the water a flickering golden, orange, and red hue.  Freshly fallen fall leaves floated on the surface of the rotenburo.  The dry heat of the sauna provided a comforting respite from the crisp fall air and the pervasive water vapor of the indoor bath.  After soaking in a welcome and rare aether free of infants screaming, I bought a glass bottle of 5% milk from the vending machine and floated aimlessly back to my home with my family in our four-door Nissan.

I live in Hirano, an area of farmland on the edge of Iizaka onsen, the largest onsen resort near Fukushima City.  A friend and I decided to visit the public bath last week to relax and discuss economics, and after finding two onsens we knew of to be closed, we gambled on a place we had never been to.  With places like these, there is an appropriate respect and deferment due to locals, older people, and older locals, as with surfing.  We were careful to be unobtrusive.  When we entered the small facility, we were surprised to find a group of old men we knew from another place we frequently visit seemingly in charge.  "Hey, how are you guys?  Good thing you came here.  This is the best bath in Fukushima!" one said to me, as I entered the two-meter by two-meter 46°C water.  I suppressed any instinctual or emotional response to the heat as the Stoics once did.

In November, families often mark the passage of seasons by getting together for imonikai, which are big nabe parties.  Last weekend we drove to my wife's aunt's house, and we helped cook and eat a barbecued assortment of meats and vegetables and miso soup for fifty cooked in an iron pot in which one could easily fit a small child.  I asked my wife's aunt where I could buy such a big pot.  She replied that she had received it from her mother, who had received it from her mother.  

I had to leave the party early for work, but when I got home, there was a regular-sized pot full of the miso soup from earlier in the day sitting on the stove.  Indeed, November is the best time to begin regularly making nabe again.  Throughout the winter, creative variations on a master nabe are enough for at least one meal a day; usually these soups are turned into curries by the end of their runs.  

Today, the family went to a friend's house, and we made two varieties of curry - one with spinach, chick peas, chili, and homemade, homegrown tomato chutney - the other with ground beef, whole tomatoes, and onions.  A variety of garnishes were available for the more adventurous, and mature, soft, peeled and sliced persimmons provided striking relief to sweat-inducing spices.