This year the Muzuhashi family won’t be going abroad during the summer holidays for the first time in four years (in 2022, 3, and 4 we went to the UK, Canada, and the UK again), and by the time I got round to thinking about booking something in Japan, either the prices were sky-high – for example, about ¥250,000 for return flights to Sapporo – or the mode of transport was fully booked – although it doesn’t go to Sapporo, there’s an overnight car ferry from Ibaraki to Tomakomai in Hokkaido that we might have been able to catch had I checked the website about three months earlier than I did.
Seeing as we’re effectively saving so much money by not paying for long-haul flights, I said to Mrs M and the kids that we’d take some day trips instead and treat ourselves to meals out, cinema visits, and so on, and our first destination was a place called Spa Resort Hawaiians, which is about an hour away by car in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture.
Actually, this was my fourth and their fifth time at the resort, and while part of me rather dreads the prospect of somewhere so crowded and touristy, particularly now that we’re used to the routine, I usually end up enjoying myself. The one time that I didn’t was because I hadn’t slept well the night before and we went in winter, when the temperature in the cavernous, aircraft hangar-like main building isn’t quite warm enough to enjoy when you’re obliged to spend most of the day in wet swimming trunks.
Spa Resort Hawaiians makes use of naturally hot spring water and was originally built 60 years ago by a coal mining company for its workers. The Hawaiian theme was chosen arbitrarily, but particularly since the boom times of the seventies and eighties, Hawaii has been a popular destination for the Japanese, and a significant number of rich and famous folk own holiday homes there or divide their time between the two.
Despite the decline of the domestic coal industry – not to mention damage during the 2011 earthquake and a subsequent lack of customers due to the Fukushima nuclear accident – Hawaiians has continued to thrive. Even now, employees of Hitachi, which has numerous factories, offices, and satellite companies along this stretch of the east coast, can enter at a significant discount, and lots of ordinary families also whizz up the Joban Expressway (as we did) from Tokyo and its environs.
Now that M Jr II has grown beyond the magic number of 120 cm tall – and having promised that no expense would be spared – I suggested that we splash out, as it were, on all-day water slide passes. Even though the summer holidays began last week, on a weekday at the end of July, the resort wasn’t excessively busy, so at 10 in the morning it *only* took about 30 minutes to queue for the main attraction, which is called Big Aloha and consists of two tunnel slides that descend from 40 metres above ground and for a length of 283 metres each. These are supposedly the highest and longest in the country, and according to the timer, took me 44 seconds apiece to descend (one of the dads who came down after me managed 39 – he was taller, heavier, and also, I suspect, had superior sliding technique). About seven hours later when we were about to have a final shower, bath, and sauna, I suggested to M Jr II that we try one final run on Big Aloha, and having climbed the many stairs to the top (the lift was out of order, which may have been another reason for the relative lack of queuing), there was no one waiting at all and we dived straight into our respective tunnels.
The other slides were slightly anti-climactic by comparison (in fact and to be completely honest, I’ve been on steeper and more thrilling water slides than Big Aloha in the UK and elsewhere), but more than enough to keep M Jr I and II happy. Although we missed the hula dancing show while queuing for “Wonder Black” (black because it’s dark inside), we did sit down in our wet swimming costumes to see the Happy Dream Circus, which featured trapeze artists, a 13-year-old unicycling prodigy, fire breathing, and various other acrobats and clowns. Happy Dream Circus travels the country and its performers all appear to be non-Japanese, although I couldn’t find any information about exactly where they’re from, even on its official homepage, which has, you may be interested to note, an application form for prospective employees (wages start at ¥150,000 a month “depending on the applicant’s ability”).
Having said that no expense would be spared, we had a sneaky lunch of convenience store food – purchased first thing in the morning before joining the expressway – in as inconspicuous a corner of the eating area as we could find, because officially, visitors are supposed to make use of the takeaways and restaurants in Hawaiians at mealtimes.
Despite the water slides and the showbiz, the most enjoyable part of the day simply involved messing around in the ordinary pools, and not for the first time, I realised as we were doing so how Japan can live up to its reputation for peace and harmony. There may have been a couple of hundred people crammed into the so-called “Stream of Wonders,” in which you can surrender yourself to the current and be carried round and round with your rubber ring, but no one argued, barged into each other, or behaved badly (I noticed, too, that at least three dads and grandads had taken advantage of the fact that their kids and grandkids were preoccupied to take a poolside nap). The same was true elsewhere, whether we were queuing for the slides, watching the circus, or looking for a free table in the eating area.
An added bonus was that in mid-afternoon, a mostly indecipherable announcement came over the Tannoy to warn (apparently) of an impending thunderstorm. When the outdoor pool re-opened about an hour later, the temperature had dropped to a comparatively chilly 27 degrees Celsius. June this year was the hottest on record in Japan and July has continued in the same vein. Much as I dislike spending well over ten hours on a plane and suffering from jet lag for several days afterwards, even what would be called a “scorching” summer in the UK is blissfully cool by comparison.
I’ve deliberately cut down on the amount of work I’m doing during the holidays, and not just because I want to be able to spend time with my family. The below photo depicts an old baby bath thermometer of M Jr I and II’s that I now use in my bedroom/office/home gym to tell me how close the air temperature is to that of the human body, and after several weeks in the mid-thirties, I’ve started to work in the living/dining room instead, where we switch on the air conditioning to encourage the kids to do their homework. This means that I am more easily distracted and therefore not as productive as usual, but if it saves me from heatstroke, perhaps that’s no bad thing.
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