I Never Realised How Much I Don't Need That

Now, we've had a soak in the acidic/alkine/radioactive water, soaked in the communal pool, dressed up in traditional Japanese clothes.
So, what now?

Checked out the refresh salon space capsule?
　

　
It plays music, makes smells, and generally relaxes you. After you're done you get a vitamin-enchanced drink.


　 Unfortunatly, I was a little too big for the machine.

So, we're done at the onsen?

Wrong!

It is a Japanese custom to go shopping for tourist stuff we don't need.

So, lets start with the hotel shop. Here we have a bucket of premium daikon. Each of these is about a meter long.

　 Daikon ("big root"), is like a massive carrot, but white and slightly sharp-tasting. You get a little dish of the stuff pickled in restaurants. Tasty and crunchy, but you most probably don't need a kilo of it in a hotel onsen.

According to Wikipedia, daikon is "Mu" in Korean and "Moolah" in Nepali.

Now, I'm still trying to figure out why, but if you search for 大根 (DaiKon) on Youtube (I'm unemployed), you find loads of videos of cat and dog owners feeding Daikon to their pets. You can also check this production: "Nyanta kun (Miaoy), how is the raddish?".

Not only that, but you can get ...

... Renkon (lilly root) slice coasters! ("Kousta"), hand-made by a local old guy in the shop:



　 Made of real wood, $4.72

Or how about some lilly root chopstick holders?



　 Only 420Yen! Your chopsticks will look so much more...topical.
　
OK, OK, you want something a little more practical. I mean, you proabably already have coasters.


So how about some ear srapers?



　
If you want, you can also get them with shiny stuff hanging off.


　 Or some sweet-sticks. You use these to pick up sweets with.


　 Also available in the back-to-the-1930's, (aka just-found-them-in-the-forest) look:


　 But, if you want to go for the ultimate niche product, look no further:

Now, I'm sure you already knew this, but just in case - a wasabi scraper is something like this:

　
This is, of course, the old-school way of making wasabi.

Naturally, it results in a tasty, spicy but natural taste.

But the wasabi-scraper has one cruelly ironic flaw:

The wasabi gets stuck in its scraping mechanism, meaning that we need....

...yes, a scraper-scraper.

So how about a wasabi scraper-scraper made from completely natural material !

　Now, almost anywhere in Japan you can get gooey red-bean paste sweets. These can be tasty and delicious:

But you really need to understand the local market before you play this game - look at what happened with the carboxylic acid cracker with green paste.　
　

So lets try outside:

A lot of toys are strongly-represented:


　
Including a sumo-panda!
　

　 I would have bought this one if it didn't cost the same as my entire wardrobe.

Plus haircut.