Keita             Masahito             Yuki

Excited as I was by the rental brolly system I quite forgot in my last post to say that at the meal Keita told me that the AirB&B hosts in Japan have periodic get-togethers.  He showed me pictures of them in party mood being addressed by AirB&B Japan's head honcho and wearing or displaying AirB&B merch.

Does this happen in the UK?

 

I went out to dinner last week with Keita (AirB&B host) and his two chums Yuki and Masahiro to this restaurant.  The main dish was udon.  You could say it's a Japanese version of tapas in as much as you choose a variety of bits and pieces, but then they arrive in a big bowl of broth not at all like tapas.  I was happy to let them do the choosing.  Included were big lumps of giant white radish, a pickled egg, orange and white striped half moon shaped something or others and what looked like spring rolls but I was told were fish cakes.  Frankly they all tasted much the same to me and not very tasty at that.

However there was a wide variety of other dishes outside the broth; some delicious little squid, deep fried chicken, asparagus, sardines and some very smoky bits of an unknown fish.  All of that was lovely.  We washed it down with beer and sake.

It was a lively evening and it went on after the meal.   Yuki (84 year old lady) went off for a taxi home bidding me farewell with one of her few English phrases "hansum boi" while Keita steered Masahiro in his wheelchair through the streets to the Jigger Bar St Louis.  It was only a few streets away.  No Atlantic crossing was required.

There we sank a few drinks, in my case the cheapest Suntory whisky on the drinks list which tasted just fine.  Amongst the staff was an Englishman.  I think he may have been the head barman.  His backstory was of coming to Japan to help his brother in a bar 12 years ago, the business went broke, he did various jobs then came to Kanazawa marrying a Japanese girl who spoke no English on the way.  The true and tested way throughout history of learning the local lingo with the least pain.  My thoughts turned to Yuki.  Perhaps not.

I walked home around 11.

You may have noticed in the picture in this post that there is a parcel shelf above the counter for people to put their bags on.  This is quite normal and in cafes and restaurants you frequently find a bin beside your table in which you can dump your shopping bag etc.  The best version I've come across was in Tokyo where Momo and I had bench seats in a booth.  You could lift the seat to reveal enough space to store your folding bike let alone your shopping.

Those of you in receipt of WhatsApp pics from me may remember one of a gents urinal with an umbrella hook beside it.  I had an opportunity to use one of those today with a so called rented umbrella.  I was taking a trip into the country and didn't have an umbrella because I'd looked at the forecast for the wrong place and it was going to rain in my place.  So Ishimura explained to me that because it rains a lot in Kanazawa they have developed what they called umbrella rental.  No money changes hands.  In lots of shops and public places like the station there are umbrellas to which you can help yourself on the understanding that when you no longer need it you'll return it.  I picked one up when I caught my bus to Shirakawa-go and since it was raining when I got back I still have it.

Neat is it not.   

I eventually felt peckish and looked around for a restaurant and spotted the Caffe Ponte by this bridge.  It's name suggested Italy but I like Italian food and what is pasta but noodles by another name.  The place was full so I put my name on the waiting list and after a while was admitted.  The meal was definitely cross cultural.  It had a magnificent contribution from Italy that they called focaccia but it wasn't like any bread of that name that I've had before.  It was an air-filled ellipsoid of the most delicate and delicious rosemary flecked bread sitting on a small rectangular snow white plate that accommodated a circular depression filled with pesto sauce.   It was gorgeous as was the soup and the seafood pasta, which was not in the soup thus declaring itself more Italian than Japanese.  Though where does chicken noodle soup fit in, or some versions of minestrone?  I'm sure there was a tasty pudding as well but I've forgotten.

One of the waitresses was clearly not Japanese and I heard her speak accented English and thought she most probably was Italian although her accent didn't really fit that hypothesis.  It turned out she was Polish married to a Japanese.  You have to wonder where they met.

The rain continued to be a nuisance but the next day dawned bright and warm so I set off with tens of thousands of other people to Miya Jima which is an island famous for its shrine and its deer and its general delightfulness.  You take a train that heads off through the western suburbs of Hiroshima to Miyajimaguchi.  Here we are making our way out of the station.

You then saunter down to the ferry terminal where your crowd merges with the people already there and you embark on the ten minute crossing, first noting the whereabouts of the lifejackets as instructed by the tannoy.

This is what you see as you approach and it's that red torii that you fight to get a decent picture of on land. 

Here's my best one, remarkably free of tourists and other nuisances.

It's a gateway to the shrine but not terribly practical if you are not in a canoe.  Instead you can pass through this one.

There are deer wandering about all over the place very popular with the kids as you might imagine but they are not fussy about what they eat so you warned to keep a tight hold on your chips or even your oysters which are currently in season on Misha jima and selling like hotcakes.  On the few occasions I've had oysters I haven't been too impressed so I settled for a nice noodle dish in a quiet restaurant away from the main drag behind the pagoda and had a chat with an American who had just taken up employment in Japan.

After a few hours I set off back to Hiroshima and arrived just in time to catch an outburst of rain in which to make my sodden way to my hotel.  It cleared up later and I took a walk by the river.  There are actually half a dozen rivers running through the city into Hiroshima bay and form to my mind one of the delights of the place.

 

This is Hiroshima a few months after the atomic bomb was dropped on it.  The building on the right which partly survived the blast has been kept in that state as a memorial and a reminder of the enormous threat posed by nuclear weapons.  It sits at the top of a park that contains a cenotaph, an eternal flame and a museum all devoted to confirming that message.

This picture shows the cenotaph in the foreground, the eternal flame in the middle distance and the genbaku dome. which is what they called the bombed remains, in the far distance.  Here's a close up of it.

It was a very dreich day when I was there which I suppose adds to the feelings of gloom invoked by the town's history but it didn't seem to be a gloomy place.  I'm sure the people who live there are as happy as the rest of us.

The city has of course been rebuilt, including the reconstruction of Hiroshima Castle which dates from 1589.  It's set in pleasant gardens and no doubt inside there are jolly things to look at but there were too many tourists for my liking so I admired it from outside.

I admired the museum in the memorial park from outside as well when I saw the queue.

Shortly after I left the castle I came across a shrine where judging by the number of taxis and other vehicles something important was going on.  I think it was probably just a wedding but perhaps a wedding of bigshots who wanted something more traditional than the Gothic Cathedral theme park.  Here's what I assume to be the happy couple being titivated for the camera.  Although not for mine, my pics, gained paparazzi style from a distance, no doubt benefited. 

One intriguing activity that I watched seemed to involve the blessing of a vehicle.  The person in this picture, who is unfortunately mostly hidden by a another person went round the vehicle waving that white feather duster into every orifice.

You can see the person, who I take to be a priestly sort of being more clearly in the next picture but unfortunately the white duster is largely masked by a black umbrella.  I suppose the real paparazzi have problems like that all the time.

I'm not quite finished with Hiroshima but I have to go out now and I'm going to Tokyo after class so it will be a day or three till I am free to continue.

There are elections going on at the moment.  The recent pipe bomb thrown at the prime minister had something to do with them.  In Kanazawa it's loudspeaker violence that assaults the public.  I passed this lady one morning on my way to class.  Of course I've no idea what her speaker is being loud about but the phrase meaning "thankyou very much" which I can pick out gets a lot of airtime.  If she doesn't get the votes will she take to the streets to shout insults for her wasted thanks?

In the old days wealth and martial skills got you power and Kanazawa was a samurai city with money, hence the beautiful castle and a number of well preserved historic neighbourhoods. Those were spared from WWII bombing and are now the haunt of tourists snapping away and eating gold leaf ice-cream.  

Kanazawa has been working gold leaf for centuries having had small gold deposits.  The kanji characters for its name,  金沢, literally mean gold swamp.  My teacher tells me that as a child he used to go gold panning in a stream near his home. It was a game more than anything.

I've wandered round those neighbourhoods and taken a few snaps.

Inside the Samurai house in Nagamachi Buke-Yashiki district

A corner of the garden

The samurai himself safely behind glass

Houses in Higashi Chaya district

Girls in their Sunday best in Higashi Chaya

The gold leaf ice-cream they've probably just enjoyed

Back in the centre of town in the castle grounds there is an absolutely delightful garden which was laid out in 1634, fell into disrepair around 1900 but has since been reconstructed starting in 2013 after five years excavation and study of ancient drawings and literature.  Just one picture to show you its glory.

Goykusen'inmaru garden

As I write this I'm listening to a French saxophonist that I'd never heard of until I had lunch one day in a bar called Jazz Bokunen where curry lunches and music are the menu du jour. You can have a dose of Lagavulin on the side as one of these pictures shows.

The music available

 

Fancy a dram with your jazz?

The record being played. The big B tells you which side.

 I went to Hiroshima at the weekend. It takes between four and five hours by train depending on how long you have to wait for a connection at Shin-Osaka.  Of the 50 busiest railway stations in the world 46 are in Japan and Shin-Osaka is one of those.  Not only is it busy but it's big.  Thanks to the app I had used to scope the journey I'd accepted in good faith its connection time of 9 minutes which given the reputation of Japanese trains for punctuality could have been OK, although if I'd understood what the ticket office chappie was saying I'd have realised that he was pointing out that it was a bit tight.  

It's one of the features of using a foreign language that having worked out and rehearsed in your head what you want to say understanding the response is not always very easy.  And believe me when the responder is wearing a face-mask it's orders of magnitude more difficult and 99% of the Japanese are wearing them.  That rises to 100% in shops, restaurants, railway ticket offices and so forth.

Anyway when my teacher sucked his breath in and winced I realised the error of my ways and practised my queuing skills to change the ticket.  The ticket in question was actually for a seat rather than a journey but that's something I may return to.

En route to and from Hiroshima I took a few pictures through the window.  Not the best situation in which to take pics and most are destined for the bin but I did capture a couple of interesting things.  This big statue for instance

My teacher is a Bhuddist so I thought he might be able to enlighten me although it's obviously not Bhudda himself.  Well he tells me that in the period known as the "bubble economy" round about the mid 80s people had money to burn and liked to show off by putting up statues and other follies.  He says it's a big problem now because no-one has either the money or the inclination to maintain them.

The other snap I took shows what seems to be a large Christian church, a cathedral even.  This interested me because historically Christians had a raw deal in Japan, like being tortured and put to death over a period of about 280 years.  A stone's throw from where I have my lessons there's a catholic church associated with a feudal lord who refused to renounce his Christian faith some time in the 17th century.  He's regarded as a martyr and was beatified 2017.  There's a lovely stained glass window featuring him which I must get around to photographing. 

Getting back to this building I saw from the train.

I asked Ishimura (teacher) about it.  He was intrigued and did a bit of googling.  It turns out to be a fake.  It's described as a Gothic Cathedral Theme Park and is a venue for weddings.  There's a bridal fair on there at the moment.   

I'll get round to talking about Hiroshima next time but I'm now ready for bed.

 

Readers may remember that thanks to a Christmas present from Ewan I have been for two years an adopter of the Japanese macaques at the Highland Wildlife Park.  Clearly I had to visit the originals in Japan.  These are the animals that bathe in a hot pool just like their human counterparts.  Originally it was the same pool apparently but as I overheard one visitor say "I don't want monkey shit in my bath water", so they built a separate pool for the monkeys.  It's really only in cold weather that they bathe and even though there was some sleet while I was there only one animal ventured into the water.

To visit the park I went to Nagano for the weekend.  It was pouring rain and getting dark when I arrived.  I'd booked a hotel that was cheap and near the station but was damned if I could find it.  I staggered about the streets for a while wiping the rain from my eyes and my phone screen and eventually stuck my head into a restaurant and asked a waitress where the hotel was.  She pulled a phone out of her pocket, looked it up and asked me to wait.  She ran to the back of the restaurant, came back with an umbrella and proceeded to lead me through the streets.  Now it wasn't terribly far but it was across a couple of roads and round a corner or two so I class that as ginormous kindness to a stranger.  Not just from her but from the boss who let her leave her job to do it.

On the Saturday morning I joined a small group for a day tour that included visiting the monkeys.  First we went to the amazing Zenkoji Temple.  The place was packed with tourists and I guess there were a few worshippers thrown in.  It's very beautiful and colourful.

Approaching the main temple, hat concealing guide

Monks arriving for some ceremony or other

Don't know who these chaps are but must be important

After the temple visit we went off to lunch and here's my meal.

Beautifully presented as seems always to be the case.  The thing that looks suspiciously like a toffee apple is a small ladle used to take liquid from the white paper bowl in which meat and vegetables are cooking.  All very tasty.

Lunch over we travelled for about an hour to get to our take off point.  From there we walked through a forest for half an hour or so till we came to the park.  The monkeys, of which there were zillions, completely ignored the visitors, even brushing against us as they went about their business.  That consisted 99.9% of the time in scrabbling about for food.  Just like Scotland's troop they had a penchant for keeping their heads down and their backs to those of us trying to take pictures but I got quite a few.

The following day I headed out of town.  Nagano is surrounded by mountains, the highest of which is about 2,300 metres.  It hosted the winter olympics in 1998 and as will undoubtedly be the case in 2026 at Milan/Cortina (which I hope to attend) events like ice hockey were held in town and the skiing in the mountains.

I saw a party of skiers arrive in Nagano when I did and subsequently saw the odd person carrying a snowboard so the season was not quite over but these people must have gone pretty high up given what I saw or didn't see.   The Hakuba express bus lists Iwatake Mountain Resort amongst its stops.  That sounded just the place where I could potter about, have lunch and then catch the bus back to town.

The best laid plans and all that.  The journey there was lovely; pretty countryside, Japan's longest river, glimpses of snow-covered peaks.  But the resort!  Deserted.  Not a soul in sight.

No snow, not open for business

So I set off downhill and had a splendid walk for about an hour to Hakuba station.  I could have done it in much less time but I was in no hurry and took quite a few pictures.  It's not that easy to get good landscape pictures because the place is festooned with electricity cables, distribution being all above ground.  But here's a couple of shots.

From Hakuba station there are trains to various places but not to Nagano so I had to wait for a bus.  I used  the wait to have something to eat in a tiny restaurant.  It was a sort of vegetable fritter cake with noodles in a broth.  Totally delicious.  I've forgotten what it was called but my Japanese teacher decried that as incorrect.  I've now also forgotten what he declared it should have been called.

A last word about Nagano.  I was struck by the legend on the side of the buses and even more so by

the tune that is played when the zebra crossing lights turn to green.  

The arrivals area in Tokyo airport was a sea of chaos.  As we made our way towards passport control etc there were a number of young people waving placards at the stream of arriving passengers and calling out instructions.  The placards bore red and blue images and the instructions were to follow the “fast track route” or not.  On one of the Japanese tourism/government sites you can fill in various forms and upload documents which allegedly results in a set of QR codes being sent to your phone and which will speed you through arrivals.  I’d tried that before I left but couldn’t get it to do anything useful for me.

So I became part of the melee that constituted the non fast track crowd, and it really was a crowd.  I joined a group around a young Japanese girl who was holding up a transparent plastic folder of the type you stick into an A4 ring binder.  It was a trifle crumpled but you could see there was a sheet of paper inside that bore a QR code.  She urged us to aim our phones at this code.  If you can imagine half a dozen fractious tourists waving their smart phones at this wee girl’s upheld arm amidst a crowd of tens if not hundreds of people, because she was not the only person charged with this task.

Unsurprisingly my phone did nothing.  So I was ushered /dragged through the crowd to a little laptop where the girl and I filled in a form of vital information – my name etc.  All of these readily available from my machine readable passport and from the landing card I had filled in on the plane but let’s pass on.  Having filled in the form a button was clicked and a sheet of paper issued from an adjacent printer bearing a QR code.

I was then directed to a line of desks where the QR code sheet was processed in some way and I presented my PCR report.  No question of vaccination certificates or apps thank God.  The PCR reigned supreme.  £65 well spent.

Next it was passport control where photos and fingerprints were taken.  Just as in Miami the camera needed a few attempts to get my likeness.  I was relieved of my landing card, my passport was swiped and stamped and I was through to the baggage hall.

My bag appeared promptly and I headed for customs.  My heart sank when I saw a number of people whose luggage was in a state of undress but the man took my passport and the customs declaration I’d filled in on the plane, glanced at them, handed the passport back, smiled at me and said “finished”.

Next it was domestic transfers where they tore up the boarding card I’d been given in Edinburgh and gave me a new one. I was told to take the shuttle to terminal 1 which I did.  It was a long way.  The boarding card said Gate 21.  I couldn’t see any signs with gate numbers so I asked one of the various official looking fellows who directed me upstairs.  Here there was a long corridor.  It appeared to be split into sections A to G and a bank of numbers above those sections I assumed were the gate numbers.  21 was at the rightmost end of this bank so I set off for the far end of the corridor and headed through the security control.  But I was turned back.  Here the airport does not provide the security screening.  Each airline does its own.  So I had to go back to an earlier section, go through their security control, turn right and head again for gate 21 at the far end of the corridor.  

It was straightforward thereafter.  Flight to Komatsu, airport bus to Kanazawa.  Queuing for a taxi I chuckled at the funny accents of a couple of French Canadians in the queue.  Who’d you think you are Neill?  Modern taxi drivers the world over seem to have abandoned learning the names and locations of hotels in favour of keying them into a GPS system.  He got me there.  The guides tell you there is no need to tip taxi drivers in Japan.  Some suggest it’s likely to be taken as an insult.  Maybe, but this chap didn’t raise any objection when I told him to keep the change.

The hotel was fine.  Lots of stuff you wouldn’t expect to find in a cheap hotel room in the UK.  An actual alarm clock, slippers, a shoehorn and polishing cloths, a multi connection phone charger, a LAN cable and a garment which may have been a dressing gown or a sleeping coat.

Given that I hadn’t had much sleep for a couple of nights I didn’t stay up too late and didn’t get up too early on the Friday.  I had a good wander around town, took lots of picture, had a pleasant lunch of what I think was minced raw tuna and rice. I washed it down with a nice Japanese draught beer.  I was still pretty tired in the evening so I didn’t go out.

I’d been in touch with my AirB&B host about getting into the apartment on the Saturday.  We agreed he’d pick me up about 12 so I had a leisurely breakfast and sat in a park enjoying the sunshine till then.

Keita is a really nice guy whose broken English is a great deal better than my broken Japanese.  The apartment is pristine.  It’s furnished in Japanese style.  Those chairs without legs are a challenge.  The floor level bed is not so bad though the work of getting up confirms my decision to give up skiing on the basis that when I fell over (as one does) it would take a miracle to get me upright again.

He's taken pity on me since and added a western style chair and a small worktable of a reasonable height.  

On Saturday night I walked up to Kenrokuen Gardens, deemed one of the three finest gardens in Japan, which in honour of the season was lit up and open late into the evening.  It was absolutely packed with enthusiastic cheerful crowds.  Various food stalls lined the entrance road and were doing roaring business.  The castle grounds opposite were also open and the castle was floodlit.  All very lovely.

Keita took me out with a couple of his friends on Sunday for a picnic and some cherry blossom viewing.  We went to Noto, a town not far away where he comes from.  It was an interesting day with a drive along a beach and a visit to a place where a local building company had developed a little cherry tree park.

On the way back we drove along a 10 kilometre stretch of road bordered on both sides by cherry trees in full bloom.  

On Monday I started my language classes.  It's hard work and a trifle overwhelming at the moment but I'm sure it will be worth it.  It's a very pleasant 20 minute walk from the apartment to the class between the gardens and the castle and through a large park.  Serendipity of course.

I haven't done very much other than wander about and try to get a feel for the place and the people.  There are lots of museums and historic whatsits to investigate and I'll do my best to fit some of them in and report here.