Japan 2009: Shirahama, Wakayama, Izu, Japan

My friend Corey Mintz settled on Shirahama as his almost-tropical destination of choice, for his trip to Japan. It was before my first trip and he got the idea from the Lonely Planet guide who raved about it. Shirahama roughly translates to “white sand”, and that’s what you get: 2km of white beaches on the Pacific Ocean. If you go off-season, which is essentially the 11 months of the year that aren’t August, no one’s there. “It’s like Muskoka after Labour Day” as I would explain to my Canadian friends after returning. I don’t have a clever colloquialism for you if you’re American, apologies.

Before the 2009 trip I saw Corey down and implored him to describe his trip to Japan, from start to finish, so I could steal all of the best parts. Shirahama was one of the best parts. I also learned not to only leave myself an hour to explore Sapporo, but that’s for another post.

So yeah: Shirahama is a resort town, sister-citied with Honalulu in Hawaii. It is 3/4 empty in the off-season. It is beautiful, a truly strange mix of post-war Japanese architecture and Beach Boys / Jan & Dean surf-culture. Oh, and naked outdoor onsens where you sit in a pool of scalding water as the waves crash down right next to you; the Pacific Ocean goes on forever.

I could live in Shirahama.

They greet you at the train station in Hawaiian shirts.

There are empty hotels everywhere.

This is a second-floor onsen, just off the beach looking out to the ocean.

This is the beach.

This was Tuesday night I believe. No one on the beach but us and the locals.

Because we were outside with two brand-new cameras, the setting on all of these photos are a little dark. It was an overcast day, but bright, and really warm. 75-80 degrees or so. You’ll also notice a significant different between Andrew’s photos (above) and mine (the next little batch).

Here’s another view of the onsen-on-the-beach.

In Japan there really are vending machines everywhere, including on the beach.

Kiddie Shower.

A meat little restaurant/ice cream stand, that you had to cross a bridge to get to. And check out that roof…!

You can see it better here, one edge of the beach has a large rocky outcropping that’s rather lovely to walk out onto. Looking at these pictures now, the scale is really weird… it’s actually a huge area and outcropping. Maybe I need a camera with a better depth of field? Next trip.

There were actually three onsen on the beach, this is a little foot-bath with a lovely tranquil garden and not-too-hot water. Customary with all Japanese baths, you had to wash your feet before you could put them in the bath. I mean, you didn’t Have To, there was no one around. But that’s when our morality is tested. Japan operates on the honour system, fella.

Pretty eh?

So this is just a little bit past the foot bath, and this is when our initial stroll on the beach got a bit creepy. It’s about 3 in the afternoon here, and this shop is closed. In fact, the restaurant and ice cream stand was closed too. Everything was closed. Heh.

The next batch of photos will be behind the cut, for folks reading at comics212.net. For folks on feed-readers, this is gonna be a huge post. Sorry!

For those not in the know, these are big concrete things that keep the shore from eroding. They’re called ‘tetrapods’. Popular opinion is that they don’t work, and may have started out as political graft because someone owned a construction company a favour. Heh. They are neat though. They come in triangle and explodey-shapes.

The yellow rubber on the sidewalk is for the blind. It’s everywhere.

So this here is one of the oldest onsen in town. It didn’t seem to be open while we were walking by, else I’d have stopped in for a dip. It also seemed a touch unfriendly, but maybe we were imagining things…? Anyway, just off camera to the right, in front of this building, is a statue. It’s no ordinary statue though.

It’s a dripping conch shell. I don’t want to be… well I don’t want to be untoward but my is that evocative. Of something. I took a video.

Heh.

I took this picture like 12 times trying to make it work. Enh. The colour on that market (closed of course) was amazing.

As I mentioned, most of these hotels were almost completely empty. Not a one of them had an English language website, none of them were affiliated with a major chain, none of them were on Expedia. We ended up staying at a guest-house off the beach solely because their website was basically-constructed enough that google translate didn’t completely choke on it when I tried to figure out the amenities. They all looked amazing and next time I go to Shirahama I’m going to show up even if I can’t book the hotel ahead of time, because who doesn’t want to stay at some of these places…? They’re awesome.

This is a picture of a tank of sulfur-smelling hot water. It is gross as all hell. It’s also just inside the entrance to Shirahama Saikinoyu Onsen, mentioned in 8th century Japanese texts as a place where Emperors came to take their baths. As mentioned, it is a scalding 42 degrees or so, and sits outcropped into the ocean, so that the waves literally crash down on you. It is a quiet, meditative, beautiful spot. I highly recommend it. I didn’t take pictures though, that seemed a little bit… awkward? Luckily, other people had no such compunctions.

It’s definitely worth seeing for yourself though.

On the walk up the road we passed by a couple of larger resorts, including this Onsen Theme Park, which looked… awesome. Sadly, that wasn’t the exact experience we were up for this time around, but we did get to take a picture of a fat little man in a washtub, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Then we got lunch at a lovely little restaurant that served this Nagisa beer, which was also pretty good! I got a past dish that was actually pretty solid, and Andrew got:

Pizza! But not ordinary pizza…

Pizza with chopped (actually, riced) hardboiled egg, cheese, and tomatoes. On a cracker crust. Because… Japan! Also, the restaurant was entirely filled with middle-aged ladies and us, which (particularly in the south of Japan, in a tourist town that doesn’t get many gaijin at all) caused a bit of a stir. Anyway, we liked the beer so much we brought some bottle back for our friend Paul and his beer-rating pals.

What’s that, just outside of the restaurant?

Why it’s a totally kick-ass house.

So we had walked back around and towards the water, to one of Shirahama’s main attractions, Senjojiki. It roughly translates to “thousand tatami mats”, as the ocean has eroded the soft stone over thousands of years to create a series of impressive cliffs. It reminded me of Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, actually. To get there you walked through a magical forest.

Actually, it was just a lovely little park with trees that look slanted because the grade of the ground is so steep.

There were maybe 20-30 people here all told, which made it the most people we saw at one time for our entire trip to Shirahama.

Andrew’s away on the rock in the upper right corner there. He’s the yellow dot.

You can sort of tell that Andrew was a little braver than I was. Only a little tho. 🙂

On the way back to town from our walk, we took photos of more weird buildings, more weird hotels, and some lovely flowers. But really, I want to leave a little something to the imagination.

Shirahama is not a terribly easy place to ‘do’ if you’re not at least a little fluent in Japanese, or unless you happen to be very determined. But it really was a wonderful trip and it added an entirely new dimension to traveling to and across Japan. If you can, do it! Just maybe do it in early July, unless you wanna spend your vacation on the beach with 10,000 other people instead of 5.

– Christopher