Hakone and Kaizen

I just have to write a few notes about my recent two-day business trip to Japan’s famed Hakone resort.

Located in the Hakone mountains in front of Mt. Fuji, this area is a hot spring (onsen) resort also at the doorstep of the greater Tokyo area.

To get there by train is a funny exercise. Until Hakone Yumoto runs a “normal” train, then you have to change trains to a mini local mountain climbing line that leads up to a town called Gora. This funny old train has only one track and goes in serpentines up the mountain, sometimes waiting for the down-coming train and riding back to change tracks and to climb further up (which means it goes in zig-zag pattern as well as serpentines). It takes about 40 minutes to climb roughly 400 meters in height.

Arrived in Gora, you then change to a cable car that goes up the mountain until you reach a rope-way station (where you finally see Mt. Fuji when you ride down the other side of the mountain again to Lake Ashinoko) …

The hotel where our seminar was held lay in the middle of the cable car track and when the train stops it opens its doors on both sides. Now I didn’t check which side my hotel was on and got off to the left…

I went up a steep hill to a hotel on the left only to find out it was the wrong one. I should have gotten off at the cable car’s right side! The guys at the reception said, oh, your hotel is right over there, but there is no way to cross the cable car tracks around here…

Great! After 7 p.m. the cable car runs only every half hour and they advised me to wait for the cable car to come down again, and hop through it to the other side. I told them I don’t want to wait for half an hour, and asked if they couldn’t call me a taxi and then they said, you know what, we’ll drive you over… Now that is Japanese service

So this guy from the hotel drives me for two kilometers or so around the cable car tracks to their other side to my hotel. He said that actually a hell of a lot of people get out on the wrong sides and the hotels are pretty much helping each other out and drive their lost guests around the tracks, happens about two three times a week or so on average that he drives someone over.

Actually it happens more often, since they send the people back to the cable car tracks when the train frequency is higher during the day and they only need to wait 10 minutes or so for hopping through the cable car… Now a bit of Kaizen would be to build a few pedestrian bridges over those tracks! I shall suggest that to the city of Gora.

The “grand spa” of my hotel, which I hit in the evening was nice, but I’ve seen quite some onsens during my time in Japan already and was rather disappointed that the one of our hotel had no “rotenburo” = an outside portion. One disadvantage of living around hot springs is sometimes the smell. I didn’t notice anything when I arrived, but in the morning, when I opened my window, the distinct whiff of sulfur tickled my nose.

But, I do not live there and so, once in a while a little sulfur doesn’t seem too bad

The seminar went well and on the way back some colleagues took me by car, which, with smooth traffic, took half the time of the train ride, but that was only because we left the mountains early enough to avoid the traffic jam.