Guri Goo: Not Just ‘Uzi’ Spelled Backward

In which Izu tea is not exactly procured and an onsen vacation becomes a bootcamp.

You wouldn’t be wrong if you had accused us of overconfidence.

Some 87 days into this double dragon era—the twins just shy of their three-month-birthday—we set off for their first trip. The destination? The Izu peninsula’s foremost onsen town: Shuzenji.

I’ve longed to visit Izu, that little hazy outcropping abutting the horizon off the lapping waves that hit Kamakura shores, since before I ever came to Japan. When researching a possible trip back in the early 2010s, before I even met my partna, I saw a green, mountainous area not far from Tokyo with beaches and tea fields. Like many words featuring the letter ‘z’ it also just sounded righteous. Uzi backwards. I was sold.

About a year later, perhaps not so oddly enough after all, the second photo I ever saw of my aforementioned first mate featured her smiling on a surfboard in Izu waters. That we hadn’t visited the peninsula proper, only frequenting Odawara and Hakone several times on its fringes, was only a matter of chance. Or was it? I contemplated this before departure while sipping a delightful Sunshine juice-sponsored smoothie with the Kamakura Inter FC goalkeeper at WITH cafe.

And I asked myself, “Where better to first take the twins for their first plunge back into the volcanic waters from whence they hatched than the first place I told her I wanted to visit when we got to talking about Japan way back when?”

Nothing to make you even more overconfident than a nice ‘meant to be’ narrative bowtie. And contrary to proper suited occasions, in this case, boy do I know how to tie ‘em. ‘Plus, just look at us!’ we said. ‘Look at how smooth we’ve landed the spacecraft of parenthood! What ho! Let’s go!’

And why not throw in the grandparents, and the dog, for good measure? Sure we’d have to rent a van and stuff it beyond capacity and fidget with turret-like car seat swivels just to enter/exit the tank between battles. Sure we’d be trapped, as onsen resorts often trap you, into set meal times and locations that demanded a type of punctuality we have deliberately avoided to keep stress levels low since the sprouting. Sure there’d be heat. Probably too much of it. And sure there’d be rather hilly, complex terrain on which to heave double strollers.

But if at this point you haven’t done the math already for yourself, let me do it for you. The above equation does not add up to vacation. Rather, it adds up to bootcamp. Earth prison.

I know, I know. When I invited you into the Tea W/ Dweez bubble, I promised joy rides. But can we pour out a little, at the very least, for that which I clung to hardest in my travel-addicted youth: freedom.

If we accept, as the wise have told me, that illusory freedom is doing whatever you want and true freedom is doing absolutely and wholly what you must, then consider me trapped on the peninsula between these freedoms. The phony & the holy.

There was no rest. Not even time to put my two-workshop-deep illustration skills (thanks to my drawing sensei, fellow Substacker Sneaky Artist Nishant Jain) to brush up these hooligans with my depicter of choice: a calligraphy brush and Sakura coupy-pencils.

There was very little relaxation. I joked that the 47 hours of labor and the 1 hour of onsen time was worth it. I joked that I wasn’t joking. I wasn’t joking.

There was humor—the rolling eyes of one of the twins into bliss as he was soaked into onsen nirvana, the devilish chuckling of the plot to park the stroller far from the dining hall to prevent other guests from hearing the wails, the first-ever proper untimely excrement explosion all up on the car seat-AC unit at check out, the granny wizardry and the failure to properly install the promised dog run on the premises.

And perhaps one of the calmest moments of the whole extravaganza came on a stone bench between the oldest building in Izu and the grave of the second Shogun Minamoto Yoriie, who had been banished to Izu. I prayed at Shuzenji and thought of his abrupt end and he told me to keep going. And I told him I would.

So no, I didn’t get to stay in the room where Natsume Sōseki convalesced and accelerate my own transformation. I never found Kawabata’s dancing girl of Izu. Nor paid my respect’s to the other Minamoto who met his end in Shuzenji: Yoritomo’s brother Noriyori.

But what I did find was tea. Not in a traditional tea room that I explored by wandering down an alley in the free hours I didn’t have. Not in a modern wavy tea space that I found online and sought out. No. I found it in the unmanned hotel gift shop that was mostly filled with golf gear. I’m not one to promote purchasing see-through bags of tea knowing what light and heat can do to the delicate bounty within, but a cool ¥500 (about $3.50) for 100 grams to a guy at the end of several ropes? I took the deal.

Round Izu parts they call it Guricha—which elsewhere, Kyushu especially, it is known as tamaryokucha—the type of sencha where the last step of rolling/shaping the leaves into fine needles is omitted, thus you are left with a curlier tea that producers profess is smoother than its shaped counterpart. Not arguments here in terms of smoothness, but this particular batch also leaves little else besides that sensation. I’m rocking in cold brewed now, on this, yet another sweltering late summer day. It is, decidedly, bland, if I’m being honest, and I discovered that the producer Takamuraen actually gets their leaf from farms in the Makinohara region of Shizuoka, so it’s not ‘Izu tea’ exactly, but if I’m learning anything these days it’s that corners will need cutting. And so I’ll get cutty.

As my concept of what it means to travel continues to swirl along in the blender, its formerly fixed pieces as tiny as the deep steamed sencha shards of this here guricha mizudashi, my thoughts turn to my tea-mates, who are away in the mountains of Spain retreating from the distractions of the world, as I was last year at this time.

So much has changed, and yet, I sit wavering like a swing state voter between these two freedoms.

I’ve spent a life loyal to my preferences, opinions, ideas—all of which I was willing to ‘sleep when I’m dead over’. Indeed my heart knows what it means to be filled with arbitrary conditions. So, let me ask you, do you know which peninsular trip offers spaciousness, graciousness and a willingness to be led?

Because that’s a place I’d be willing to endure another boot camp for. Send me the brochure. In exchange I’ll send you this overflow of confidence, if I can find where it ran off to whilst I sit curled up like a little Guricha ghoul waiting for autumn to start in earnest.

Oh, Guri

Bounty of blandness
Tesla coil of tasteless
You sawdust shaped
Comma splice 
Of a tea slog
You deserve 
A park like
Mentaiko got
In your own town

Mishima City
Don’t Let The 
Bad Guys Win!

Look here
This isn’t 
Me hating
On a tea
It’s just 
A leaf-shaped
Splinter
Got lodged
Between 
My phase phalange nails
And I’ve been 
Trying to shake it out
By playing FDT
WAY TOO LOUD
With the windows
Up
Down 
The block from
The Big Buddha
Where the sea
Sighs at my stutter stop

But looksie here
Theres a message 
In the swamp
This bottle holds
Send Help
Send Humor
Send Horsey Sauce

But instead
Actually send
Branco Berry
So I can dunk
Into my old
Life

But only, 
importantly, 
crucially,
For a single
Sneaky 
Day.