Pulling out of the station in Hakodate, taxi tires crunch through the roundabout only half-cleared of snow, something done with the best intentions. Our cabbie is chatty. He jokes with us in broken English, while underneath is a sadness, a mourning for his dying city; a feeling that manages to transcend the language barrier. The first thing he points out to us is a defunct department store that had been operating at a corner there since the 1930’s, until its closure 3 years ago. He doesn’t know how to say the reason in English, only No people. Gio fills in the gap with Zannen, which covers a slew of emotions that is predominantly “unfortunate”.
We have been carefully riding the rim of a snowstorm, one that has been ravaging most of the northern hemisphere this season. It’s been a cruel winter in many areas. Aomori, the city we just left behind, is locked in its annual battle with their infamous walls of snow and its consequences, the ever-present problem of what to do with it. There had been much in the books for that leg of the trip, involving Aomori’s famous apples and miso curry milk ramen, but the snow made it impossible to leave the station. It was a bust, but we didn’t dwell too much on it. There have been deaths; the residents already have a difficult time as it is without my entitled bemoaning.
Here in Hakodate, this smiling curve of a coast in the butt of Hokkaidō Prefecture, the winds are beginning to howl like a banshee. Snow flurries create dizzying whorls in a pas de deux. We are staying for two nights, and the beach in front of our ryokan is smeared white from snow instead of sand, already beginning to dune.
The cold and increasing winds make us stay indoors. The ryokan has buffet dinners and breakfasts; it is only too easy to be swayed into staying in. We waddle out into the open air of our onsen pool twice a day amid the swirling snow and do not venture outside at all. Our views of the town are limited to the 7-11 across the street and the Tsugaru Strait beyond our window. We nap and I write and Gio plays and we drink ourselves to a hot-cocoa stupor at the free drink bar in the lounge. We get a massage from the nicest obāchan. We walk around in clunky-fitting getas and cotton jinbei pajamas.
I have never been a fan of the term staycation. It’s such an ugly compound word, with an aura of laziness and lack of creativity. The Japanese language has a specific word for vacationing in a hotel and not venturing out, but it did no better in its coinage: hokans, also a blend word, a fusion that is characteristically Japanese between hoteru (hotel) and bakans (short for vacation). As it is, despite the lack of a tasteful term for it, this is precisely what we did in Hakodate and while it might be viewed as a waste of time and money to those who peek into how much is truly budgeted into our frequent trans-Pacific trips to the land of the rising sun, I owe no apologies. The older I get, the more I view travel differently; much differently than I did in my 20s. Our travels no longer consist of jam-packed schedules featuring tourist spots and must-sees, but idle walks, café stops, journaling, endless shop-browsing, a regional diet, and perhaps a relaxing pause or two. We have been squeezing in onsen breaks whenever we’re in Japan, but this one — our sixth, in fact — has solidified its necessity to me, in any country we visit from here on. Our bodies are on an inevitable decline; the best thing to be done is to pamper it a smidgen, and not subject it to tiresome escapades in fear of missing out.
