(Hong Kong – Osaka – Kyoto – Kochi - Shimonoseki - Toyama – Akita - Hakodate – Sapporo – Wakkanai – Tokyo – Toyohashi - Nagoya)
In which “Liaison” in Hong Kong is intense; an “honorary” “grey nomad” gaijin unwittingly joins gregarious Pensioners' Day Trips away from big city Japan.
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Cathay Pacific’s morning flight out of Sydney to Hong Kong: for once the “drawn-shade Nazis” didn’t insist on a dark cabin during sparkling daylight. On a crisp and clear day I watched Australia slide beneath the plane from the aerial spiral over The Shire and Sydney Harbour Bridge across suburbia and the Blue Mountains to starkly dry-veined, watercoursed Longreach in Queensland then to the milky blue seas “girt” by light ochre beaches and olive-scrubby Kakadu headlands. The “drawn-shade Nazis” then did their awful work and I was directed to the “entertainment system” and its multifarious delights.
My aisle-seat companion was late 20’s, fashionably unshaven-hipster-scruffy and crapulous; recently headhunted to an internship with the finance markets in Hong Kong. Following yesterday's last uni exam he had “done an all nighter”. Several trips to the “rest room” later he was freshly “rested”, shirted, more fragrant and talking. This was his first overseas trip and he was verrry excited. The “drawn-shade-Nazis” were ignored as he tested his geography-through-the-window-against-the-flight-map en route… I started to feel a little old....
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Hong Kong Stopover:
Staying well out of the usual tourist haunts in an Ibis pub (wake up in a bland room and guess what country you are in…) at North Point, I had a wide and uninterrupted view along and across the grey harbour to the old Kai Tak Airport strip (now being developed as a cruise port and elongated public park). I could spend hours watching water traffic (through sweeping drizzle clouds) such as the Star Ferries and cruise ships and the gradual shuffling around of moored boats with the tides. Without realising it, I’d booked into the middle of mainland-Chinese-organized-mass-tourism to Hong Kong, complete with neat and hatted tour guides fluttering little flags on wire uprights, followed by a motley pack of “first timers”. It’s been a while since I was pointed at and photographed as bearded Western fauna, complete with toddlers screaming at first sight. Younger members of the party would say a murmured “Hello” as they passed. Older guys at the back just spat in the gutter.
Fathers’ Day in the top floor hotel bistro: extended Chinese families enjoyed indifferent “western” food and Bombe Alaska, with lights regularly dimmed for the sparkler show. I was rescued by a friend and taken to a Vietnamese cafe on the "wrong side" of western yuppified Times Square.
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Hong Kong’s MTR Subway is basic and superbly efficient. The Public information signs are a delight:
“PLEASE DO NOT BRING METALLIC BALLOONS INTO THE MTR”
“ANIMALS, BIRDS AND POULTRY ARE NOT ALLOWED” and so on…
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It was not long since the “25th Anniversary of Common Law”: a big deal in Hong Kong politics where “rule by law” is seen as less corrupted than in the Chinese Mainland. The Mainland is, increasingly openly, pressuring to reduce democratic freedoms by many small cuts, to try to construct a “Chinese" approved version of "Democracy”. The “Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” seems to “liaise” with Hong Kong media, officialdom and industry in the same way that a benign Mafioso might “liaise” with victims of a protection racket. The growing attempts to manipulate Hong Kong political affairs seem to be morphing into increasingly open interference with local media.
There was growing on-line media concern about Chinese “Liaison”. Freedom of the press was gradually being neutered as “unfriendly” columnists were “let go” or put on limited contracts by the Straits Times newspaper until they wrote with “correct” opinions. Hong Kong Chinese are still buying units in Sydney or Vancouver as “somewhere to go” if the Mainland government becomes even more bellicose towards its Hong Kong SAR.
Unpropitiously, the local “LegCo” (Legislative Council) had just botched a vote on universal suffrage for the “chosen candidates” (Mainland government NOT happy: “Liaison” in overdrive…). Outside of the LegCo on Sunday were a few damp remaining yellow umbrellas of the pro-democracy demonstrators, outnumbered by many more sodden Filipina and Indonesian maids singing and dancing in the light rain to portable karaoke and CD players on their sole day off.
Also in the Hong Kong TV news: A banker facing financial ruin despatched himself with a Molotov cocktail; there was an annual Dog Meat Festival somewhere on the mainland. I was in a plastic-and-white-tiled Shanghai cuisine restaurant (specialising in raw meat and peppery, slightly soapy “pho”) during this news cast, hearing about the crazy working hours of my dining companions. (Try a 4am start for a 4 hour shift in a printers, followed by a second job of 8 hours of office and messenger work, 6 days per week....).
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Osaka Kansai (KIX) Airport:
I know that airport Immigration and Customs are not meant to be pleasurable, but the polite Japanese have made the KIX Arrivals one of the more tedious travel experiences. Kansai Airport is on a treeless, rectangular, reclaimed island and has a general air of needing some freshening up. I was still “digesting” Cathay’s version of a short-distance non-lactose meal: nursing-home-style steamed white flesh (possibly fish… maybe chicken?), steamed rice; grey pureed peas. At least the green salad contained a lemon wedge to use on everything else in an attempt at flavour. The two chatty retired Australian women sitting next to me (off to spend 2 weeks living in a Japanese temple near Kobe) had even more extreme allergies. They received the same meal and quickly abandoned it for BYO fruit and rice crackers.
The “welcome” Immigration Hall at Kansai is, after many, many metres of glass corridors and possibly an automated train ride, in a large 60’s box of a building with grey painted walls and light grey ceiling, grey floor tiles, grey fences, grey Immigration booths a long, long way past the end of the queue, and grey faced officers in black uniforms enlightened by white face masks to avoid foreign germs. The general greyness was relieved by festive yellow banners proclaiming enhanced anti-terrorist procedures. The queue-maze took over an hour with the arrival of two monster Chinese charter flights. Their contents swamped the queueing system, so a much longer-ribboned ziggy-zaggy route was constructed by grey officialdom and the Chinese were suitably and compliantly “mazed” in an even longer queue. Chinese citizens know better than to challenge uniformed authority.
Once outside the grey concrete terminal, in the fading grey dusk, you are greeted by competing railways at garish adjacent booking windows offering fast trips into Osaka: JR with sleek white Limited Expresses to Kyoto and less sleek “rapids” to Osaka; Nankai Railway with something that looked like a blue aircraft fuselage with the bow of an ocean liner as their Limited Express: tempting, but it would land/be moored in the wrong end of downtown Osaka for me. The JR Rapid it was.
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Suddenly you are becoming immersed into a unique national culture where the following are day-to-day realities:
* An ATM will shout at you in female rage if it doesn’t like your card
* Train conductors - from bullet trains to lowly local services - bow and perform a little speech before checking tickets. The “trolley dollies” on Shinkansen (bullet trains) do the same before whispering gently to you as you purchase a bento lunch and iced tea.
* Soft Bank is not a Bank.
* Shiny black taxi interiors are a riot of pure-white lace
* “Rinky-dink” chimed classical and popular music or electronic bird calls surround you from pedestrian crossings to hotel lifts, and every city JR station has its own jangling theme music. Packed commuters can “hear” their stop, even if they cannot see it. My favourite from Osaka was “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad” at one of the city loop stations. The music unleashes another short burst before departure: doors slam shut and the train is off. The racket is constant, except in the placid peace of a public bath house or your chosen accommodation.
* TV chat shows all seem to have their resident middle-aged transvestite commentator on discussion panels. (Why?)
* School girls wear sailor-suits and black knee socks. In northern Kyushu, a “naval” high school had its adolescent boys decked out in what looked like British sailors’ uniforms with peaked officers' caps and metal school insignia.
* There are vending machines everywhere for food (hot and cold), drinks (hot and cold); even for batteries. They all work. They give reliable change.
* That relentless crashing noise in the distance is millions of ball bearings in Pachinko parlours. You buy them by the bucket load, then drop them into a kind of vertical pin-ball arrangement. No prizes are on offer: that would be gambling. You might score a ticket to take to another business to see if they will exchange it for something more interesting.
* Women in demure kimonos stand in crush-load peak hour trains while salarymen doze in the few available seats. Toddlers have absolute priority for bus and train seats.
* You really can sleep soundly while strap-hanging in the peak hour crush.
* Electric toilet/bidets with seat warmers come with a detailed wall poster of instructions for correct use.
* The bizarre ritual dance of train and tram drivers who gesture in a sort white-gloved mime routine to point-check timetable, time, everyone clear of doors, shut doors, all clear ahead, accelerate… This public performance (there are big windows so everyone can look in on the train crew and forward of the train) happens at every stop, to a greater or lesser extent. The guard will bow and thank you as you step from train onto the platform. Train cleaners bow and gently thank you before boarding to blitz your terminating carriage in several minutes.
* Pink, half-metre high plastic “Hello Kitties” support temporary street barriers for road works.
* The large restaurant near my Osaka pub was called “Eat Me”, with thick vertical tubular white neon signs above the corner entrance. I found the laneway coin-in-the-slot cafes, bars and German pub more than adequate.
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A quick visit to Osaka station booking office waving “Hyperdia” printouts and a shiny new JR Pass scored me seat reservations on 22 trains across Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Hokkaido for two weeks. The extended daytime journey of 16 hours on 5 trains from the northern outpost of Wakkanai, along half of Japan to Tokyo towards the end of the trip, included a mere 6 minutes to transfer on Sapporo. In Japan this is more time than you will actually need. I started to ponder how much I could read and doze and how many bento I could consume over 17 hours on a variety of limited expresses and Shinkansen...
At a day spa near the Hankyu pub: “Welcome to Osaka! Would you like to try a Japanese head spa? Nose hair removal is also popular. Feel free to drop in any time!”. The illustration was a young “gaijin” (foreigner) business man with his right digit plunged well up a nostril.
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Day 1, Kyoto, Honshu:
A mix of local trains took me to Kurama for a quiet immersion into forested mountain temples of Kuramadera through massive wooden traditional gates past ancient mossy arches and monuments with quiet mountain walkers bowing as they passed. Several helpful posters demonstrated correct ways to clap hands and bow to worship. A quick couple of local trains skirted the Kyoto sprawl to Yaze-Heizanguchu, an ornate Victorian station with a short walk past traditional housing to the funicular train then aerial rope way to Mount Hiei. The immediate mountain scenery was fine, with (real) bird calls, especially within in formal gardens at the top of the mountain.
This is where I noticed that the few other visitors (of a certain age) and I seemed to be regularly bowing and crossing paths. Yes: this was a retired Japanese person's day out... And I was to enjoy many similar day trips on this journey, away from westerners and organised tour groups and school kids, on nice pensioners' day trips...
On the way back to the Eizen railway in the funicular, an old couple from Tennoji haltingly explained in very good English that all of their travels were in Japan. They had heard many terrible stories about friends having troubles or being charged too much when they were abroad, and they were many, many beautiful places to see in Japan. JR promotes internal tourism through frequent TV travelogue programs and by ensuring that each major station (usually part of a huge complex of department stores and food outlets and often topped by a huge red ferris wheel) has a local specialty food store among the bento counters. They were right: and the stores were always crowded with Japanese travellers looking for local specialty food - always labelled in Japanese - so a continuing mystery to me...).
Another cocktail of local trains returned me to Kyoto and to Ginkaku-ji: a Zen temple complex constructed in the 1480’s, designed for rest and solitude, set in traditionally laid out grounds including a light grey, sculptured sand garden. Also festering in the (not-so-restful-and-solitude-inducing) landscape was the awful reality of massed school group tours in Kyoto and the Japanese group-selfie with playful finger signs and fixed grimaces as calm teachers attempted to herd adolescents with their Hello Kitty backpacks through the "tourist path" and into the extensive souvenir shop. I sought peace on the "Philosophers' Walk" with very few other walkers along a rocky canal/drain, and cherry trees (blossoms long gone) and a gentle wander through placid Kyoto daytime suburbia...
My companions for lunch were two Hungarian travellers and three large, fluffy toy dogs. Let me explain: Café Bear is a lunch cafe and bar. In amongst the Suntory poster ads and "specials" is a line of large fluffy toy bears sitting bent over their beers at the bar. Smaller bruins were placed on shelves and as small table companions. Solicitous service of Katsu and cabbage: photos encouraged.
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Kochi, Shikoku:
Once you have rumbled across the several miles of double-deck bridge onto Shikoku island the train to Kochi climbs rugged gorges, tunnels through mountains, then negotiates down even more spectacular ravines with sea glimpses and villages clinging to mountains, reaching sea level, passing through Gomen with its three-metre-high smiling sculpture of a benign blue station master. All this takes your mind off the sponsored lurid cartoon figures decorating seats, frolicking across walls and ceilings and plastered outside of the carriage
Welcome to small-city Japan where not-so-many signs are in English and one of the few genuine 18th century castles (as opposed to others rebuilt after fires and war) dominates the skyline at the top of a central hill, with its white painted walls and dark turreted roofs. Construction hoardings on the walk to the looming castle feature large and angry whales chasing fish sellers and fishermen. Wander through the "keep" and climb the cobblestoned roadway through manicured trees. The dark castle interior is supported by original, massive beams with carved lintels, simply designed shutters and partitions. It also includes green medieval armour and weaponry separated by rice-paper screens. I was the lone visitor apart from an old couple and toddler who were resting among the armoured displays. A final set of wooden stairs led to a narrow balcony and unobstructed views of industrial and brown-roofed suburban-sprawl Kochi with more distant glimpses of green farms and northern hills.
I did the “board a local tram and see where it takes me” thing in Kochi. In this case it was a trundle through the western suburbs on a wide and untidy boulevard, then onto a gravel-ballasted roadside railway past fast disappearing rice paddies before rolling back into brown and beige suburbia: turning from Gomen’s quiet main street into the small Nakamachi station. Here a huge granite stone is witness to life in 1940’s post war Japan:
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE OPENING OF THE ELECTRIFIED AKI LINE
ELECTRIFICATION OF THE AKI LINE. WHICH HAD BEEN OUR LONG-CHERISHED DESIRE. WAS COMMENCED IN NOVEMBER 1948 AND COMPLETED IN JULY THIS YEAR. THE RAPID COMPLETION OF THIS WORK WAS DUE TO THE CORDIAL ASSISTANCE OF LT-COL. OSCAR A AXELSON. CHIEF OF THE KOCHI CIVIL AFFAIRS TEAM. TO OUR GREAT JOY. IT HAS NOT ONLY PROMOTED THE WEL-FARE OF THE LIVING PEOPLE ALONG THE LINE HAS MADE A GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO THE CULTIVATION OF FRIENDLY RELATIONS BETWEEN AMERICA AND JAPAN THE PUPILS AND STUDENTS OF THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES CONCERNED HAVE DECIDED TO HAVE THESE WORDS CARVED HERE IN COMMEMORATION OF THE DISTINGUISHED MERIT OF LT-COL. OSCAR A. AXELSON TO EXPRESS THEIR MOST HEARTFELT AND EVERLASTING THANKS.
THS MEMORIAL IS PLACED HERE BY THE PUPILS AND STUDENTS OF THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES CONCERNED. NOVEMBER 30. 1949.
SHIGERA YOSHIDA. THE PRIME MINISTER
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Mojiko and Shimonoseki, Kyushu:
The bullet trains dive under the Kanmon Straits between Kokura in Kyushu and the main island of Honshu, but above the ground is a lot of pre-war preserved Showa architecture bypassed by progress.
Mojiko station is preserved wooden dinginess in neo-French-Renaissanceish-Showa style on a wet day. It’s not hard to visualise pre-war hordes of people from the Shimonoseki ferry crowding up the gangplank and waiting grimly in smoky groups under dim yellow lights for steam trains to take them south to Hakata, Beppu and Kagoshima. The preserved station bell and rickshaws lead you into a photo exhibition and the JR Kyushu museum. Across the road is the preserved 1921 built Showa-faux-Tudor Old Mijui Mitsui Businessmen’s Club. You can imagine suited salarymen and uniformed armed forces officers mixing in the warmth before the next stage in their pre-war or wartime journeys. The faded port is promoted as “Mojiko Retro”: the bustle has long gone. Early 20th century buildings from the old port are being painstakingly restored. The short walk to the cross-strait commuter ferry takes you past “Bear Fruits Café” (closed) for the 20 minute bounce across the waves avoiding elephantine container ships while admiring the elegant highway suspension bridge swooping to Honshu in the gathering misty drizzle.
On the Shimonoseki side, in amongst road works, discount barns, car parks and seafront malls lurk more pre-war buildings (reminiscent of rather severe surviving Japanese Imperial colonial brick architecture in Taiwan and Shanghai) including a moderately grand British Consulate building (offering high teas) and a 3 storeyed, dome-towered Akita Company building with trees leaning out from a formal rooftop garden.
Further west in Shimonoseki city is where the 1895 “unequal treaty” was signed between an increasingly aggressive the Empire of Japan and the weakened Chinese Qing government, ceding various territories to the Japanese, including Formosa and Korea. As an exercise in appeasement, it was hardly a success. (Memo: Neville Chamberlain...). Most of the station and industrial port area was bombed during WWII so, apart from a rather lumpen former grand hotel near the station, not much of the original downtown remains. It is also the base for the current Japanese whaling fleet: this is the current Prime Minister’s electorate, after all. The local delicacy is “fugu”. This potentially lethal "puffer fish" is famous in local seafood restaurants, requiring deft and highly trained specialist chefs so that their diners are not killed by stray toxic fish bits. Several one-metre-long, spot-lit bronze versions of barrel-shaped fugu fishies grace the green roofs of the downtown public phone boxes. Noice.
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Breakfast, Kokura:
Toyoko Inn: the kind of budget hotel where you collect your freshly laundered yakuta from a sanitizing electric cabinet at check in, in return for the polite credit card swipe. Bullet trains accelerate slowly and silently past your double glazed window. Breakfast was in a very small lobby with a very large television tuned into Japanese soap operas. I was riveted, that is until the three young women at the next table started preening themselves using the selfie app on their mobiles as a mirror. It was almost enough to interrupt the concentration needed to scoop up watery scrambled eggs with pointy chopsticks….
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Fukui, Honshu:
The local tourist sights are promoted on JR stations. A large and grinning raptor sitting on the platform seat (holding a dinosaur skull, “Alas-poor-Yoric” style) greets you as you tumble off the train from Osaka and start looking for a locker. In Japanese stations there are always coin lockers, but possibly not quite where you expect them. An excellent mime routine from the “Fare Adjustment” man at the barrier directed me down past Shinkansen construction and 500 metres of shops and counters and bento stores to the far end of the adjacent department store: perfect! A local inter-town tram ride through extended rice paddies and snow sheds to Takefu and its local museum (with the Japan Alps in the snowy, hazy distance) filled the afternoon nicely.
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From “Japan News”:
10, 783 Japanese dementia patients were reported missing in 2014: 168 still remain to be found.
Tokyo Olympics cost estimates are being greatly outstripped by the actual costs of building a new stadium.
The “Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami disaster” also drains the public purse…
It's much more fun reading the news in Japan, than tuning in to the 7pm "English" NHK TV news which is dubbed live into a kind of expressionless BBCish mid-Pacific accent.
A large plastic warning sign at Fukui station conveniences: “Being Cleaned by WOMEN”
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Kurobe Gorge, northern Honshu:
A 2’ 6” gauge mining railway from the hot springs town of Unazuki Onsen to a hydro electric power plant at the end of the gorge at Keyakadaira, clings to the side of gorges and rapids, climbing sinuously through tunnels and bridges into the Japanese Alps from a gentle thermal valley towards a stark ravine of aqua streams with small glacier tributaries and distant snow capped peaks near the hydro power station terminus. This also seems to be a bit of a local Toyama pensioners’ “nice day out” and, unlike most Japanese city travel experiences for foreigners, the retired like to talk to we "gaijin"… or to anyone really. On the local train from Toyama into the foothills of Unazuki Onsen was a long conversation with a recently retired office worker from the Kikkoman company: you would have eaten their mild soy sauce. Once we were through the niceties and employment and family, I was asked: ”Is it true that Sydney Harbour is as beautiful as Yokohama?” I was diplomatic.
During the walk across to the narrow gauge station in Unazulki, I was “picked up” by two retired/divorced ladies: one taciturn and the other hypermanic in graphic fluorescent tights and glitter! glitter! glitter! all over a green pullover. Well… the taciturn one took many photos of us, standing, sitting, back to back, arms enthusiastically raised… Sadly they were booked in first class with the rest of their small group. I headed to the other end of the train to the open-sided cheap carriages near the humming, boxy electric locomotive. I was increasingly feeling like an honorary Japanese “grey nomad” by this stage of my day-tripping…
You know it’s a bona fide “tourist experience” when, as the train engine groans up hill out of every station, all of the staff are wearing an identical sincerely-soapy, toothy smile and doing an identical one-handed twisty-wristy wave. Even the crew on passing trains and the guys in oversized overalls working on the tracks did the automatic grin-and-wave thing. This was feeling like calculated, processed, tourism-infantilisation of what was an otherwise spectacular experience from thermal hot water fountains, through pine forests to alpine peaks.
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Omiya to Akita:
The bullet train (cherry-red and grey with an aggressive, elongated art deco streamlined garfish/one-eyed-lizard-shaped nose) to Akita, took a sudden swerve to the left from the viaduct at Morioka. No longer were we barreling along concrete viaducts at 300+ kph. This 21st century technological marvel had become a much slower mountain train, wandering over level crossings and spindly bridges (fishermen waving from below), pausing at wayside halts to pass downhill trains, and twisting its way at one third of its design speed to Akita in the northern Japanese Alps. At Akita station there was queue at the front of the train. It is, it seems, the "done thing" to have your serious-faced portrait taken with the train of your holiday journey, before leaving the station. There was an orderly, elderly queue to do so.
Two rather more bulbous looking narrow-gauge limited expresses took me to an overnight budget “SMILE” pub near the preserved port area of Hakodate, before a slow morning railcar. The few branch line passengers wandered across the misty and drizzly back-road mountain line from Oshamambe to Kutchen and Otaru with no snow, but plenty of snow sheds, mountain glimpses, snow ploughs, dairy cattle and several faux-Swiss-Showa-Alpine ski resort-style stations with large neat firewood stacks. Old freight wagons, converted into boxy shelters, were the damp isolated wayside halts.
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Wakkanai, northern Hokkaido:
Stumbling off the "Super Soya" express from Sapporo into sub-Arctic cold drizzle (this is just across the Sea of Japan from Siberia, after all), the northernmost port town in Japan shelters under rich, rolling green coastal ridges. Street and shop signs are in Japanese, Russian and English. Quickly dumping my bag at a nearby business pub, I jumped puddles through the pop-up dried seafood market back to the station. Bypassing the "local delicacies" store I looked to pick up the local bus to Cape Soya. By this stage it will not surprise you that I was the youngest person in a queue of a dozen or so retired folk. As usual at Japanese bus stops, the queue was orderly and politely silent, even when stretching beyond the shelter into the steady, sodden-clothed drizzle.
Japan's northernmost point is starkly treeless and wind swept. A concrete triangular frame marks the cape, with photographers overseen by a glum statue of the Tokugawa noble who first surveyed the area. Beyond the tawdry cafes, car parks and souvenir shacks, and beyond the public facilities (“BE CAREFUL TO TSUNAMIS”) are concrete stairways to the rounded grassed hilltop where things get interesting. They say that on a fine day you can see Sakhalin in Russia from here. It wasn't, and we couldn't, through the scattered rain showers sweeping across the La Perouse Strait. Beyond the 19th Century naval tower (so handy for defeating the Russian fleet in 1905) and a socialist-realist sculpture of a young man and woman waving circular bronze ribbons (a peculiar tribute to the Hokkaido dairy industry) was a vast marble memorial, shaped as an origami crane, with carefully tended gardens between its wings. This is the “prayer monument” memorial to Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down in 1983 when the plane had strayed into Soviet air space. This is the nearest non-Soviet land on which the Korean and Japanese governments and bereaved families could commemorate the disaster. Slightly closer to the coast is a smaller stone memorial to the USS Wahoo 238, an American submarine sunk with the loss of all hands in the Soya Strait in October 1943.
Back down at the cape monument, a sole cyclist in orange overalls and a bike loaded down with Nike panniers was taking selfies, before setting off to ride and ferry southwards across all of Japan.
It was standing room only (toddlers on seats) for the slow bus load of grey-day-trippers and a few others. We skirted the coastline of neat white lighthouses and typhoon-shelter harbours in the streaky yellow-grey, glassy-sea twilight through misty drizzle.
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Tokyo:
Wakkanai to Tokyo:
Four trains in a day to traverse half the length of Japan: the “Super Soya” (first breakfast bento: dairy farming and mountain scenery), “Super Hakuto” (lunch bento spread with a rank salmon top layer: "local specialty"), “Super Hakucho” (bento-free zone as we swept along the pristine coastline, looking back to Hakodate Mountain before plunging under the Tsugaru Strait to Shin-Aomori) then the bullet train to Tokyo.
In the crowded local specialties shop at Shin-Aomori were dinner bentos, just right for the 5 hour barrelling ride on the Shinkansen to Ueno. The was the last of the Friday night trains into Tokyo before the midnight JR shut down. No retired folk on this train: just sprawled, exhausted, dozing "suits". Arriving at the usually teeming Ueno station was largely quiet as most of the pre-midnight local “last trains” had long since departed.
After the polite and placid nature of regional Japanese hotels, the Korean run Sardonyx pub in Ueno was loud and physical and noisy and basic with Kimchi on the breakfast menu (boiled egg 5 yen extra). I liked it.
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I first met Fumiko in Mexico. We had travelled several days through Copper Canyon on the same trains, usually staying at different pubs but sharing bag-minding, rainstorms and blackouts. We’d agreed to meet up if we were both in Tokyo. Fumiko is an adventurous scuba diver in her late 60’s and teaches Japanese language all over the world. (She was based in the not entirely placid or drug-gang-free Cuidad Juarez when we met). She and her very elegant classical-music-teaching friend offered a morning walk through Tsujuki Market.
Do go. It was a collection of laneway restaurants and shopfronts and the culmination of much of what I had tasted on Japanese travels, without necessarily knowing what it was. That ubiquitous cold, sweet rolled omelette is made with saki in square pans before being rolled and sliced. A large tuna was painstakingly reduced to sushi over several hours (for the benefit of Canadian TV cameras) on a restaurant street counter. Toothpick loads of anything fishy, boiled, grilled, fried or raw, were offered for tastings through the several blocks of shops restaurants and arcades before a reflective visit to the Tsukiji Hongan-Ji Jodo Shinshu Buddhist temple. It is built in ornate brown stone in a variety of Indian and Buddhist and Roman and Islamic styles following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Its solid stonework and large prayer hall are utterly unlike most wooden Japanese temples. We paused for some time, enjoying the peace with the sole priest quietly bowing and praying with a subdued couple below the altar. The temple’s welcome sign: “How Wonderful This Encountering Is” pretty much summed up the morning, crossing paths with past travel companions, and then a counter lunch of huge mixed sushi bowls of most-things-we-had-seen-in-Tsujuki.
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Nagoya; Kanji Futo:
The JR MAGLEV and Railway Park quickly became another “pensioners-with-toddlers” nice-day-out. Behind the huge steam engine and somewhat cute 1930's tour bus was the first of JR’s MAGLEVs (magnetically levitating trains): the prototype for a 400+kph new line being constructed from Tokyo towards Osaka. A mere Shinkansen is no longer enough, it seems. In the exhibition hall were 50+ years of bullet trains and a collection of less glamorous vehicles from the twentieth century. The 1960's Shinkansen dining car menu was sort-of tempting: Hamburg Stake Set, Beef Stew Set, Broiled Eels Special Set, Fried Prawn Varie Set; Japanese Style Special Set. This was the height of 1970’s business travel sophistication in the lurid orange, sakura, brown and black diner. The first bullet trains were timed to hit the rails for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, part of the massive PR campaign to demonstrate Japan's democratic and industrial advances in nearly 20 years since the defeat in World War II. Edo Museum in Tokyo has a flag for the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, which did not occur due to some international difficulties at the time.
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Leaving the tawdry Sumo palaces and the squat, fake, Eiffel-style communications tower of the run-down 1960’s tourist centre of Tennoji behind; enjoying the free, cooling, overhead mist provided on bus and train platforms during hot days, I boarded the Rapid commuter train to KIX and its greyness. Any sense of airport tedium or regret once inside the Secure area was soon dispelled by the sight of lurid red discount pharmaceutical and appliance duty-free stores being loudly and energetically plundered by packs of rampant, departing, Chinese package tourists.
Given my two weeks of regional pensioner-with-toddler day trips, perhaps the "Lactose Free" nursing home mush on the returning Cathay Pacific flight was more appropriate than I might want to think. It was still 50 Shades of Off-White Gruel of indeterminate origin. I was starting to miss the taste and texture and careful arrangement of bento meals, each with their inevitable saki-omelette scroll and decorative single, salt, plum.
