Another small town in the northern part of Honshu is Hanamaki. The centre of town itself is nothing special, but it has many onsen hotels in the area, and we stayed in one which had a particularly pretty setting. Here's the view from the back:
There were pleasant walks to be had around the surrounding farm area, with featured many rice fields. (Mind you, rice is grown absolutely every it can fit in Japan. Staying with friends well in the middle of in Osaka, their apartment looked over a small rice field.) While I had seen green rice fields in spring and summer before, I didn't realise they went a nice golden colour before harvest:
Not only are houses, hotel rooms and cars small in Japan, so are the tiny sized rice harvesters:
Walking around, we saw this older style onsen, still operating apparently, but it put me a little in mind of the one in Spirited Away.
This flower (cosmos, I believe) was very common this visit, including in the gardens and roadsides around Hanamaki:
This was a very large, extra-touristy, onsen hotel, with entertainment each evening. The local farmers' elder sons (the only ones allowed to do this, apparently) presumably make a bit of extra money of an evening by doing the deer dance. This clip is not too exciting, but I'm sure you've wasted your time on worse diversions:
After all that walking and entertainment, it is reassuring to see the automatic defibrillator in the hotel foyer:
These have become an incredible fad in Japan over the last few years, and they appear in all sorts of places now. (Soon I expect they'll be in cars.) One wonders whether the staff administer the shock, or if they have to wait for the ambulance to arrive. (UPDATE: anyone can use them, apparently, and there is a very interesting and detailed article in Nature about how and why they have appeared everywhere in Japan.)
So, you can do certainly do worse than try the onsen of Hanamaki. Wish I could remember the name of the one we stayed at, but my wife will know if anyone is interested.
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