Journey Across Japan | Day 15: Why I NEVER Film in Akita (Patreon)

Dogs, demons, and Natchy Ruinard.

We venture into Akita for today’s Journey Across Japan episode.

In our previous outing, Joey and I didn’t so much as journey, as drive in circles around Hirosaki solving crimes, like a shitty Scooby Doo (armed with a pig instead of a dog).

In stark contrast, in today’s outing we had one of the lengthiest road trips of the entire series.

Now I love Akita to bits. My first ever excursion in Japan was actually a weekend holiday to Lake Tazawa in October 2012, Japan’s deepest lake and home to some spectacular ryokan and hot springs. It was here I had my first ever ryokan experience, a precious and rare treat at the time.

Yet in the years since, despite many trips in and around Akita, we’ve only produced one decent episode in the region on an excursion with Ryotaro a couple of years back. In fact, I once received an angry email from a viewer, disappointed that we’d completely neglected Akita, like some sort of bastard child I’d sooner forget.

(Previously)

So why is Akita the bastard neglected son, while my favoured son, Aomori, features in well over a dozen videos on Abroad in Japan.

The truth is Akita is huge, sparse and a bit tricky to get around.

Every car journey across take a bloody eternity, and when it comes to scenery and hot springs, its neighbours Aomori and Yamagata have the edge. Meanwhile Iwate has the most stunning coastline, Fukushima has the best cuisine and sake and Miyagi is the most accessible prefecture, home to Sendai and glorious Matsushima Bay.

The two best spots in Akita are without a doubt Lake Tazawa and Kakunodate, an old fashioned samurai town and unfortunately on JAJ, as you’ll see in the next episode we got very unlucky with the weather and had to abandon a few plans we had.

The good news is we’ll be returning to Akita after JAJ wraps for another video, so we’ll be making up for it in due course.

But in today’s episode, in remote northern Akita, Joey and I had to track down no less than six unconventional attractions at a moments notice to fulfil the challenge of the day; producing two commercials for Akita in the style of 90’s tv commercials.

Our first stop was an abandoned water park which summed up the issue facing the region pretty graphically; Spa Resort Owani. Once an impressive and sprawling theme park costing millions and nestled on the border between Akita and Aomori, the park was only open a few years before coming to a close in the absence of visitors. 

Now degraded and long abandoned after 30 years and a real tragedy. We wanted to go in and take a closer look but the facility was well and truly sealed off and as a rule of thumb, we only enter abandoned places if they’re easy to access and not fenced off with warning signs as we don’t want to trespass illegally - especially in 4k.

I was a bit weary of filming the Nipro Hachiko Dome as an empty stadium isn’t exactly content; but the design of the stadium was genuinely impressive given the sheer quantity of wood used. And apparently you can rent the dome out for fun; maybe it’s time for another camping trip?

(Or an epic paintball shootout).

If you’re ever in the neighbourhood it costs around 500yen to enter and stumble around.

Let’s not beat around the bush - the dog museum was pretty disappointing.

I’m not sure where all the dogs were, but the absence of dogs wasn’t the only thing I noticed while revising the dog museum (Ryotaro and I filmed there a couple of years back).

On the wall of the museum there used to be a photo section showing all the folks who proudly owned an Akita dog, with a great big picture of Vladimir Putin up on the wall. No doubt it’s currently being used as a door mat.

My highlight of the trip was actually the restaurant serving up what might just be the best Chicken meatball skewer I’ve had in 10 years living in Japan. That’s a pretty big compliment coming from someone who absolutely stuffs themselves with yakitori on an almost twice weekly basis.

It was so juicy and flavourful and the Yakitori-don bowl was one of the most delicious meals I can recall from the entirety of Journey Across Japan so far (the Gyoza is still no.1).

Our next stop was an artificial hill that claimed to be the smallest mountain in Japan and I’ll quietly glaze over this one, suffice it to say, if it wasn’t on our route we wouldn’t have gone near it.

Still our route did lead us to Godzilla rock and despite being utterly ridiculous, it was nice to get some fresh sea air while gazing at some absurd perspectivist art. You have to wonder if fate did indeed morph a rock on Japan’s windswept west coast into Godzilla’s head or if some locals took it upon themselves to carve out a makeshift local attraction.

Either way, I hate to admit it, but it was a fun diversion. I’ve driven passed signs for Godzilla rock a ton of times over the years and never bothered to check it out. I’m glad I can finally tick this must see attraction off my list.

The highlight of the episode was undeniably the commercials, hastily bashed out by Joey and myself in the evening. While this Journey Across Japan was edited by the ever cheeky Marcus (“Mr Contractually Obliged” from the previous episode), I was the lucky editor tasked with turning our awful commercials into something actually bearable to watch. 

I’ll leave it up to you which commercial is better; Joey’s seems more faithful to an actual 90’s budget TV commercials and mine’s more absurdist, using advanced VFX to conjure up an elderly tour guide from your nightmares.

What I love about travelling with Joey on JAJ is that him and I make a pretty good creative team and the fact we were able to take a bizarre review from a random stranger called Natchy Ruinard and turn him into a grumpy elderly tour guide just about captures the essence, for me at least, of what makes these trips so great.

Only on Journey Across Japan can you find this unscripted, wacky, ridiculous kind of shit.

Joey returns for his final episode next up and unfortunately the weather really screwed us and shattered any plans we had for a good video. That’s not to say it’s terrible; a beloved character makes a return with an explicit rap and we have a read through of the worst challenges submitted by viewers (I think my favourite was simply “drive backwards for a day”).

There’s some brilliant outtakes and bloopers from this episode that’ll be appearing in the Patreon Exclusive Behind the Scenes video alongside the final JAJ video, but for now guys, enjoy the episode and have a great weekend. We’ll be back in a few days for the return of Dr Jelly.

Chris