2019 Japan Trip - Day 4 - Exploring Kusatsu

Day Four

We started our second day in Kusatsu.  It got started with a traditional Japanese breakfast that came with the room.  The food at the Kusatsu Onsen Boun is top-notch.  Very good and very filling.  

And the baths are pretty good, too.  There are two sets of baths, a total of six in total, I’m told, four inside and two outside.  They switch off every day, with the baths designated for the men the day we got there being handed over to the women the next day.  

I’ll go over the method of using a Japanese bath later (and it’s not just cleaning your body, rinsing off the soap, then drying off).  

For now, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about the town and what I found there.

Kataoka Tsurutaro Museaum

There are at least two art museums in the town that I spotted.  We decided to visit the one closest to the Kusatsu Onsen Boun, the Kataoka Tsurutaro Museaum.  

Mr. Kataoka is a former boxer turned actor/TV personality/Artist.  All the pieces in the museum are his creations.  The audio guide you can rent for 300 yen (about $2.80) tells you something about him in the beginning of the self-guided tour.  

I’m not sure why the museum is in Kusatsu.  Wikipedia has him born in Arakawa, Tokyo.  Maybe he moved there in his later career.  I do know that he likes to talk about his reason for making art, and the process he goes through each of pieces.  

I don’t want to be too much of an art critic.  I think I heard the term “naïve artists” to describe someone that is untrained or entirely self-taught in terms of their process.  I think that would apply to Kataoka’s work.  Most of the pieces are fine as far as they go.  He likes to pick his subjects from the things he hears about or sees around him.  There are some pieces in the collection that I found to be more stirring and interesting than most.  

One such piece is Takizakura.  It’s named after a 1,000 year old cherry tree located in the town of Miharu in Fukushima prefecture in the Northeast region of the Japan.  Kataoka heard about the tree and travelled to the town to see it for himself.  The painting is based on pictures he took of the tree.  

There is something I like about paining the tree in black & white.  A visual representation that it comes from another era, just as black & white films are from another time as well.  I see something dinosaur-like in the shape of the tree.  A giant creature rising up to cry out that it still lives.  

Another painting that caught my attention was one I remember being called “Sleeping Goddess” (with apologies, I forgot to photograph the name plate and I’m recalling this from memory only).   

The explanation for the painting from the audio guide didn’t talk so much about the inspiration or the intent of the artist, which came from a village in the mountains where the people point out the resemblance of a mountain range overlooking the village.  It sounded like a reading from the artist’s diary…

The painting was inspired by mountain range that is said to resemble a woman, a goddess, sleeping on her back.  But the explanation from the audio guide was less about that and more about the effort Mr. Kataoka put into making it.  Quoting him directly, the artist tells the listener that as he worked on the painting he felt the need to change it.  He felt the need to make it darker, but as he worked in that direction it only seemed to make it worse.  He kept working on it, kept wondering if he’d made a mistake, and kept telling himself to keep working on it and not give up.  Finally, the work took shape and became the thing he had been working toward.  He, Mr. Kataoka, uses this painting as an example of how you should never give up on your vision.  You should keep trying until you succeed.  I don’t know if my feelings for the painting are colored by this explanation, which is now bound with its image in my memory.  But it is one I find noteworthy in the collection.  

西の河原公園 - West Dry Riverbed Park

West Dry Riverbed Park surrounds the mountain overlooking Kusatsu.  There are several entrances into it from the town.  

It’s a very pleasant walk, having the feel of the National Park just north of Los Angeles.  A place where the locals go on day trips to get some exercise and relax.  One way of doing so is to use one of the many foot-baths they have throughout the area.  

The water in Kusatsu area has a slippery feeling to it.  Probably due to the sulphur content.  It’s not unpleasant, and the warm bath soothes your feet after a day of walking.  

There’s a place in the park called the Devil’s Kettle.  It gets its name from the sound of bubbling water that you hear from it.  It’s said that as you approach the Devil’s Kettle it will become silent, the sound only returning when you walk away.  My experience was that I didn’t hear any bubbling either on approach, standing before it, or walking away.  Maybe the Devil just didn’t want to meet me, or felt no need to entice me to approach him.  

There is an Inari Shire in the park.  Inari is the Goddess of Rice, a very important deity in the Shinto pantheon as one can imagine.  All of her shrines will have a pair of foxes, her servants, with a ball of rice in their mouths.  I’ve also noticed that all of the temples I’ve visited dedicated to her, such as the most famous one near Kyoto, have numerous steps associated with them.  I don’t know if there is any significance to that, or just a coincidence.  But if someone told me we’d be visiting an Inari shrine, I would brace myself for some serious climbing. 

When you go hiking through a Japanese park, one thing you’ll see, especially near smaller shrines there, are collections of stacked stones.  

In Japanese culture, stacking stones is a form of pray.  The type of prayer or significance can change from one region to another.  Traditionally the stones are stacked in either 3 or 5 tiers of stones, but there is no hard and fast rule to that.  It can sometimes be intended to represent a departed loved one, and that the builder of the stones wants them to benefit from the influence of the shrine in the afterlife.  

There was one mini-shrine I found that I found fascinating.  

The main statue had what looked like a Buddhist monk holding a child.  It had a very Madonna-like feel to it.  

There was another, smaller statue, set before the hot spring itself, that looked like some sort of guardian spirit.  What he was guarding the hot spring from, or its connection to the monk carrying the child, I couldn’t say.

There is a very popular public bath in the park, near the top of the trail.  We could see groups of people waiting their turn to enter after paying their admission fee.  As we continued on the trail around the bath, we discovered that one could look down into the men’s bath area.  There they were, clear as day.  If they noticed or cared that they were in full view, they gave no sign of it.  

On the other side of the bath, we could see a tall wooden fence.  We surmised that it was there to protect the women’s bath from view of anyone on the trail.  

I took no pictures, having no reason to do so for either side.  

Flowers to Say Good-bye

When we got back to the ryokan, there was a TV crew in the lobby.  They were filming a man setting up a flower arrangement.  The Japanese term for the practice is “ikebana.”  It’s considered an art amongst the Japanese.  

I stopped and watched as the practitioner stepped back to look at what he had done.  There was a small crowd of guests in the lobby watching him.  They were hushed.  The practitioner made a decision, stepped forward, then clipped one branch, removing a tiny bloom that jutted out at an odd angle.  

The crowd seemed to relax.  Several of them broke into big smiles.  

I asked one of the practitioner’s handlers with the TV crew.  Apparently he is the most famous ikebana practitioner, or ikebanaka, in the country.  He chose to set up this latest installation in Kusatsu because he had been born there.  She didn’t give me his name.  She told me that what they shot would be aired on April 27th.  

I tried looking him up online, but without success so far.  But you get to see the arrangement sooner than the people in Japan. 

And with that, I’ll close the book on my time in Kusatsu.