Category: Travel

Anime tourism has been a thing in Japan for decades now, and historically took the form of people visiting spots that had been featured in anime series. The tourist industry took note, and soon enough anime started to deliberately include certain locations, and eventually towns and districts even began funding their own anime for tourist reasons.

After Fukushima in 2011, a tourist group decided to help revitalize tourism in Japan via the creation of Onsenmusume, or ‘hot spring girls’. This combined anime girls, idol bands and tourism. They created characters based on certain locations in Japan, and used them for promotions and to attract tourists. This became a success and the number of characters increased to exceed 100 today. Most of the hot springs I’ve visited have had their ‘own’ hot spring girl, but Arima takes it to a new level since it seems to be not only the hot spring girl characters but also ones from the game/anime Love Live all around the town.

Life-sized standees in particular are common, and we’ve seen dozens of different ones in hotels, shops and shrines.

I’m not familiar enough with these characters to know if they’re from Love Live or not (but I suspect they are), but some standees seem hotel-specific which is to say the character seems to be assigned to a hotel. Here’s ours for instance:

The circular sign on the left shows the pin badge for this hotel, which features this character standing in front of the entrance. I’m sure many hotels here in Arima have their own custom badges with different girls.

I was reading that the use of anime girls to promote onsen tourism has been quite successful, and there are rules in place – such as no online sales of merchandise – that have helped. As a visitor it’s an unusual sight, since this town is very much about tradition and yet there’s anime girl standees all over the place!

One store has a little ‘shrine’ set up showing a vast range of keychains and character merchandise. None of it is for sale, but it’s a glimpse into the extent of this branding for almost 15 years now.

Apparently there are hot spring girls now in every prefecture and district in Japan. We’re going to another onsen in a few days. I wonder if they’ll have their own?

It was an early start to the day since we wanted to be at the hotel springs when they opened at 5 am. Afterwards we relaxed in the room until mid morning when we walked toward our first destination for the day.

Arima is very close to the port city of Kobe which is why (I assume) this town has some Kobe manhole covers. Most of the covers depict a ropeway. We rode it today.

It takes twenty minutes to get to the top of Mount Rokko from the ropeway station at the mountain base, and as we climbed we noticed that sections of the forest were visibly light grey. This was due to frost, and it was a beautiful sight especially as we pulled into the station on the mountaintop.

Mount Rokko had a variety of attractions, but many of them (such as hikes and obstacle courses) are probably better left for warmer days. It was very cold at the top today, and many surfaces still had a good layer of frost when we arrived.

The views south from the observation platform were superb, and we could see for what seemed like forever in a wide arc.

It’s a little unclear in the photo, but this shows Osaka and Kobe cities down at sea level and the Seto Inland Sea behind them. Both are destinations for us in the near future.

We didn’t stay at the top very long, and the ropeway ride back down was even more spectacular. The attendant gave a nonstop commentary about the sights far below the carriage, but it was all in Japanese.

After lunch, we split up. KLS would do some shopping, and I went to visit a stamp museum! I wasn’t sure what to expect, but wasn’t disappointed.

The museum catalogued the history of postage in Japan with (literal) walls of text accompanied by stamps. Hundreds of stamps were showcased, dating back to the penny black from the 1800s. It was specific to Japan, except for a few exceptions such as this pearl shell ‘postcard’ sent from Australia to England in 2007:

I especially liked the licensed stamp display. Here’s a few examples:

I’d love to buy some of those and use them on postcards! Overall I enjoyed the stamp museum, although I admit it’s unlikely to impress most, and even less likely for those (like me) that can’t read Japanese!

Afterwards I must have been in a museum mood since I visited… this place:

Optimistically, this is the ‘salt & pepper shaker museum’, but in reality I expect it’s a private collection on display above a shop.

This place was even more niche appeal than the stamp museum, and I had a good chuckle over the fact they even had a board describing what salt and pepper shakers even are! I suppose if you know that means you’re very old 🙂

The above photo shows a foot bath which is freely usable on the shopping street, or perhaps would be if it’s not always full to seat capacity! The golden colour of the water isn’t a camera effect: this is one of the two types of water here in the Arima springs, and this ‘golden water’ is said to be good for your skin, as well as exhaustion.

Arima is great. It’s quiet and relaxing, but also has a lovely street with quirky shops and good food. The hot springs are fantastic, and there’s several attractions nearby to also check out if you visit. It was very busy today (a Saturday) with both young and old, and this is clearly more popular amongst Japanese than any of the other four onsen towns I’ve visited. You’d like it here.

An early start today and we were on the Shinkansen to Kobe, a city we’d never visited before. As usual we rode in the ‘green car’ which was more expensive but extremely comfortable and the trip was wonderful. Look at how majestic Fuji looked on this sunny winter’s day:

And then, maybe half an hour later, something unusual happened:

This is my 7th winter trip to Japan and somehow this was the first time I’d ever seen snow on the ground here! The snow was falling heavily, and the view from our cozy train seats was great. I’ll admit a moment of trepidation since we hardly had snow-weather clothing, but even before we got to Kyoto the blue skies had returned.

The above shows our two breakfasts (at 9 am?) on the train, and I’ll let you guess which of us ate each of them. We always love eating bento on trains, and if you looked closely a few days ago you would have noticed this was one category on our bingo card (which we still haven’t filled a single line of).

About 2.5 hours after we boarded we arrived in Kobe, but this wasn’t actually our destination. This was only a stop on the way, and shortly after arriving we hopped into a taxi and drove to an onsen (hot spring) town called Arima, which is where we’re staying these next two nights. (It may even be worth its own blog post but I’ll simply add here that the 8km road tunnel under a mountain that the taxi took was fascinating.)

Arima is a small onsen town built into a valley deep in the mountains. Surrounding by 20+ large resort hotels, it has a shopping street full of traditional stores containing Japanese crafts and foods. The place is steeped in history – it’s been a tourist attraction for almost 1500 years – and one of the most popular hot spring resorts in Japan.

After arriving we walked the tourist street for while and then it began to snow! It wasn’t as heavy as we’d seen from the train but it was very cold, and we took the chance to duck into a restaurant for some lunch (delicious burgers). KLS got an unusual sesame beverage that was black and tasted just like sesame mixed with milk. It was at this place that the title of today’s blog came from, specifically a (mis)translation of a section of their menu!

One thing Arima is known for are senbei (rice crackers) made using the carbonated local spring water. These are extremely thin, have a crispy texture and are incredibly moorish. We watched a guy making them in one of the shops and he handed us each one through the window. Naturally we have bought a selection but these won’t travel well except (inevitably) in our bellies 🙂

We’re staying in a traditional Japanese ryokan-style hotel, and our room is enormous and very comfy. The above shows the sitting/dining area, which features a low table with a sunken area below for feet. There’s also a large bedroom with one wall essentially a giant window with this view:

As nice as the room is we chose this place for the hot springs, and the hotel has several. There are two types of water in the baths – one clear and one yellow – each containing different minerals. Obviously photos are not permitted, so here’s one I found online showing the outdoor bath I boiled myself in earlier:

We’re up in the mountains and it’s very chilly here and when I was in the bath thick steam was rising from the water. I was the only person at the time and the water was so hot I wondered if it was even safe, but it was so luxurious I hardly cared…

There’s more to say about Arima, and there’ll be even more to say tomorrow, but I’m half-boiled, sleepy, have dozens of postcards to stamp and address and there’s some good anime on the TV so I think I’ll sign off for now and leave the rest for the morrow…