Revealing the naked (literally) truth from Japan: Letter from Kobe
What goes on tour comes off on tour. That's the mantra now after yesterday's visit to a traditional Japanese onsen, or hot spring to you and me, by a troop of the Irish media corp and our Scottish brethren. Yep, over a dozen pasty westerners walking about naked in a giant bathing complex.
It's true what they say, rugby tours really aren't what they used to be.
The maxim about there being no hiding place at a World Cup rang all too true at the Arima Hot Springs up in the mountains outside the port city of Kobe, which is Ireland's latest HQ as they go about their travels here on the main island of Honshu. The only allowance for covering your modesty was a white towel about the size and the texture of a J-cloth. (Insert joke here).
Onsen are something of a religion in Japan and almost ubiquitous given the notoriously volcanic geography that underpins the country.
Arima dates back to ancient times and it has been, forgive the awful pun, a hot property since the 8th century when a famous priest by the name of Gyoki built the Onsenju Temple on the site.
Public bathing isn't your usual hangout of choice (apologies) for the fourth estate but the great thing about Japan is how it draws you out of your comfort zone. You're eating raw tuna one minute, belting out Glenn Medeiros in a karaoke bar the next and then stripping down to your birthday suit in front of your peers and, oddly, a female changing room attendant old enough to be your mother.
You don't have to do all this, of course, but what's the point in travelling all this distance if not to immerse yourself in as much as the local culture as you can. Yesterday's day trip came with the added bonus of a traditional Japanese meal which involved at least 20 different pieces of crockery per person and one of which held three strips of the world-famous Kobe beef.
Kobe beef is deemed a delicacy in Japan and, boy, is it priced accordingly. The group of Irish writers who followed Joe Schmidt's team to Tokyo and Shizuoka in 2017 got badly stung for one bill when they unknowingly ordered the biggest steaks they could in one restaurant without knowing they were being charged by the ounce.
Some of our Scottish colleagues, who have been here in Kobe for a number of days now, had a lucky escape last week when they were on the brink of ordering only to cotton on that the cheapest cut on offer was for £180. Is it any wonder they were awarded with some sort of trophy by the waiter just for walking in the door.
Kobe itself is a stunning city, sandwiched as it is between the sea on one side and the forested mountains on the other. It's pleasant city streets are all the more remarkable for the fact that much of the place was levelled by the Great Hanshin Earthquake that struck in 1993, killed close to 6,000 people and destroyed roughly 300,000 buildings.
An Earthquake Memorial Park sits in the harbourside, not a million miles from the Ireland team hotel. Most of the players, understandably, made for the more uplifting Universal Studios amusement park in nearby Osaka on their day off, although CJ Stander and Cian Healy took in a visit to a world-famous local knife-maker.
The players don't always travel so far on their downtime. Stander and a few more of the forwards stayed around Chiba in week one to eat in some local restaurants while most demobbed into Tokyo. Jack Carty wandered around a local shopping centre in Shizuoka last week after being told he would start against Japan.
It's hard to imagine many of them sticking close to the team hotel yesterday. Ireland are staying on Rokko Island which is a large patch of reclaimed land – they lopped the head off one of the nearby mountains and dumped it in the bay – that has been renamed Shutter Island by one journo here in reference to the Leonardo Di Caprio movie set on a creepy insane asylum.
Or, as another, labelled it, Shudder Island.
It's not just that the place is dead but the fact that it's weird to boot. There are dozens of huge apartment blocks on the island but only a handful of tiny restaurants, some of which look like they've been borrowed from a Blade Runner set.
If some thought Chiba was worthy of comparison with the industrial estate that Ireland had to call home in Bordeaux in 2007, then Rokka Island could be twinned with it. Lucky, then, that there's so much to see and do in Kobe itself, whether it's a tour of the saké brewery, the cable car trip to Nunobiki Falls, or Ireland's date with the Russians here on Thursday.
The Kobe Misaki Stadium is a stunning piece of architecture but it felt like a claustrophobic sauna for yesterday's Scotland-Samoa game thanks to the closed roof, the 28-degree heat, 74% humidity and the 30,000 spectators crammed inside it. As Ireland already know, you don't need to go to an onsen to sweat at this Rugby World Cup.
