Cleaning fish in Odaiba

I took another trip to Odaiba yesterday.  I think the Yurikamome trains are my favorite so far in Japan—they run through a beautiful raised track along Tokyo Bay, past some amazing architecture, the huge Odaiba Ferris wheel and the Rainbow Bridge before looping around and crossing the bridge.  I went back to the wonderful Indian restaurant along the bay, and accumulated an embarrassing amount of Hello Kitty paraphernalia (I guess any amount is embarrassing, really) in the fake Samurai village one floor below the restaurants.

After lunch and shopping, I finally made it to Oedo Onsen Monogatari, the onsen in Odaiba along Tokyo Bay.  The onsen was huge but way too crowded—I had to wait in line to take a shower before I could get into the baths.  There were about eight different kinds of baths in the onsen, including one with real onsen water, supposedly extracted from far beneath Tokyo Bay, a gold bath, a silk bath, a Jacuzzi with jets extremely well-placed to massage the arches of your feet, a couple outdoor pools and a few outdoor barrel-baths, as well as two different kinds of saunas.  The entrance fee includes rental of a yukata (like a kimono but light-weight) so I wandered around a mock Edo-period village inside the onsen building before and after soaking in the baths.  The village was a little hokey, not that I didn’t pick up plenty of souvenirs.  Actually the locker key attached to a bracelet also had a barcode on it, so instead of having to carry money around, they scan your barcode whenever you buy food or souvenirs.  It’s quite an ingenious idea really, because it makes it very easy to buy things and near impossible to keep track of how much you’re spending until you have to pay up at the very end.  Also you can’t get to the locker area where your shoes are being held hostage until you’ve paid up.  I was happy to find a manja toy (manja are ubiquitous onsen food from what I understand, a kind of dumpling with vegetables inside), and some delicious mochi balls with cocoa powder and cream on the inside.  After wandering around the village barefoot for awhile (like I said, my shoes were being held in a locker out front), I went to the foot baths.  They provided a happi coat to put over my yukata but it was still freezing.  The water was warm, and the bottoms of the footbaths were covered with small stones designed to hit pressure points in the bottom of your foot but they were actually quite painful (and I wasn’t the only one who thought so—some of the Japanese were also complaining).  Unfortunately it was too dark to see where the stones were and avoid them, although some of the stones were placed in rows across the pool so I was able to grapevine my way forward and without tumbling into the footbath with my camera.

I was just about ready to give up on the footbath and make a run for the building across the freezing footpaths when one of my friends spotted the building with the “doctor fish”—the cleaning fish.  You pay an extra fee for a set amount of time with the doctor fish and a person leads you into the footbath area and directs you to sit down on a mat and stick your feet into the footbath.  As soon as I stuck my feet in, dozens of doctor fish swam up to feast on the apparently large quantity of dead skin cells on my feet.  It didn’t hurt at all, but it tickled a lot.  I noticed there were only a few doctor fish tending to the feet of the Japanese woman near me.  I suspect she must take better care of her feet, because the fish were all over my feet and my friends’ feet.  And when my time with the doctor fish was over, I could tell they weren’t anywhere near done with me.  My feet definitely felt softer afterwards, although there are still plenty of calluses (well the doctor fish aren’t miracle workers after all).  I got some great video of the doctor fish, but I don’t know how to post it here, so I’ll just put a picture in the photo section.  Anyway, it’s not every day you see a symbiotic relationship happening on your feet, so the doctor fish alone were well worth the trip.