honey cosmetics and sometimes Onsen

forgot to write here for a long time

autumn finally came here in Tokyo although it sometimes gets hot like 27 degree. but the smell of the autumn is so apparent that i can not ignore the fact that we are getting ready to welcome next winter soon. oh i do not want to rush to get older as the seasons go.

one of my friends is running his own business dealing with organic New Zealand honeys. and he introduced me some cosmetics made from manuka honey which is really distinctive in taste and famous for its health benefits. i heard that New Zealanders use manuka honey to cure scars and burns on their skin. so some people invented honey cosmetics to utilize the benefits for health and nature conscious customers.

so i started to use manuka skin care products to prevent me from looking older than my actual age ( here in Japan there are funny words like Arasaｰ(アラサー）, which means around 30. so i am falling into the category now. this word somehow has certain kinds of negative connotation..)

my efforts to look younger continue.......

i really like this company's manuka honey which can be bought from my friend in Japan. it is bit expensive but worth the money i guess.

before i met him, i never knew there are differences in each honey － depending on flowers on which bees work. i heard that practically there is no such a thing like expiry date for genuine honeys because bacteria can not live in honey. but there are so many fake honeys in the market so it makes sense the authority applied those food standards to honeys even if they are 100% natural.

i used to sleep without washing my face and putting cream on my face. but because of the honey skin care products i have got, i can not continue to be lazy. but happily, i started to feel so fond of taking a bath and going to good onsen(hot spring) 温泉 has become a great pleasure for me.

I went to Atami this weekend to attend my brother's wedding and stayed at a splendid hotel which has outside baths overlooking the pacific ocean. each room at the hotel has almost perfect ocean-view and there are three private outside baths 露天風呂. although i enjoyed the time at one of the private outside baths with my mother, i thought it would be great for a couple to enjoy taking a bath with a nice view. it seems there are some stupid laws in Tokyo metropolitan city which prevents men and women from bathing together in a public bath house (it is called Konyoku混浴, it used to be a common thing）. so that is why we do not find onsens which allow us to have private bath tubs in Tokyo except hotels or onsens for people wearing swim wears.

view from one of the onsen at the hotel.

there are also nice shrines in Atami such as Kinomiya shrine and Izusan shrine. the area is rich in history and used to be called ` the nearest Hawaii in Japan' which attracted newly married couples in 60' and 70's. nowadays, people go straight to Hawaii instead so the area became less attractive than before but i still like Atami much. the town itself has bit old-fashioned feeling but it must be part of its attractiveness after all.

the one onsen i fell in love in the past is in Yuzawa, Niigata.

the town is famous because of a novel written by Yasunari Kawabata who won the Nobel literature prize. he stayed at a hotel called Takahan, which i also happend to stay, and wrote the award winning novel depicting love between a man from Tokyo and a geisha working in the onsen town.  i think that kind of subtle and melancholic literature must have been quite new to the West back then. when i read his novels when i was little i could not get them and now i think i might be able to grasp his literature but not quite.

the onsen at the hotel just made me feel `do i deserve this heaven?'

this area called Uonuma is the most famous rice production place in Japan and its rice is highly prized by many people. where good rice grows, there is always good sake, many people think. this theory never betrays us.

I went to a sake brewery called Hakkaisan. their accumulation of wealth just can't be missed if we are in the town. it owns not only sake breweryies but also a craft beer brewery, italian restaurant and shops which sell kitchen products and food, and of course various kinds of sake.

varieties of sake and shochu produced by Hakkaisan

oh, i am not talking about sake, i am taking about onsen in case you misunderstand.