Posts from — September 2009

Day 20/63

We left Japan expecting it to be a culture shock. Even as we’ve been to both countries, we’ve never gone from one to another. We got the Maglev train from the Shanghai airport to town. This is a bullet train that goes 300km/hour, just because there are no rails, just magnetic tracks where it floats on. On curves, it goes kind of sideways, which is very spooky. The train journey to Shanghai only takes eight minutes, which my husband decided that we’d spend in the first class, as it was the whole of 10euros each.

We got a taxi from the other side of the river ‘Huang Pu’ to our hotel, which is the Astor House hotel, the first luxurious and modern hotel in the city, right on the Pund. The Pund is the area where the British settled down after the opium wars and eventually all the other foreign powers such as the Germans, the Americans and so on joined them. However, the French couldn’t live with the British, so they have their own area ‘the French concession’…

Our hotel the Astor House is rather impressive. Even as they are over 160 years old, they have gotten the hang of modern days. There is internet installed in the rooms for a small fee (very slow connection, but anyways) and the bathroom has hair dryers, the light switch is on the door so that you keep your key in a safe place and so on. The room reminds me of the room I stayed in Athens, wooden floors, huge bathroom… All very nice. You could even stay at a celebrity’s room, meaning where someone famous stayed like Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell or Albert Einstein. What is more attractive to me though, is that in three metres out of the door, you get to a bridge which gives out the classic view over Shanghai with the television mast building. I’ll use that for some photos later on for sure.

Of course when you step out of the door, the misery of life in China immediately begins. You get the herds of ‘Hello Lady’s excuseme, would you lie to buy some tat?)… In here they are mostly pushing to buy watches.. Perhaps that’s the thing, certainly not postcards like back in Beijing. The best way to look at pushy sales people is not to give them an eye of any kind. You put your ‘ignoring’ face on and move along. I have been surprised on how they do come to you in English, rather than in Chinese. But I suppose this is the foreign area.

You can also see the foreign area in the prices of tat. We know that there are places, quieter streets, where the prices are about 20% of the prices here on the foreign area. We had a meal for 10euros, but we know, that is rather expensive for what we got, even if it was really good and three dishes with two teas. They have looked at the foreigners around and come to the conclusion that they *will* pay more. So why not charge more.

In any case, for our first day in Shanghai, we went walking around, shopping and photographing. I bought some really nice pashminas and we went a bit mental in a bookshop that had a DVD floor. The Chinese really like awards of all sorts, specially the Oscars, so they have fifteen different kinds of Oscar box sets, oscar films in different covers and so on. I recently watched all the best Picture winners, some of which were quite hard to find. Here they were all… Even “Wings” from 1928, for 1 euro… I bought some that I had not seen and some that I’ll rewatch, like “Mrs. Minniver”, which is a great film btw. These were not illegal copies of the films, even though those are also easy to get from the streets – normally with English and Chinese subtitles… We had earlier come across to one seller, but they have already gone to Blue-Ray… What kind of world is it, when the pirates have a format that you cannot play???

We eventually walked as far as the people’s square and then home again, through a detour that seemed to take forever. The pushy-yelling Chinese tired us out so much that eventually we got into a ‘Family-Mart’ (Japanese 7-11 chain) and got salad and sushi for dinner in our hotel room… This is how much we missed Japan! China such a difference to Japan, where politeness is *everything* and here you are expected to be as agnry, impolite, rude, shouty, pushy and merciless as possible. You should spit on the streets and lie and cheat. The whole consept of the society is so different… It’s like my husband pointed out. You feel like you are in Japan, but it looks like everything is falling apart. When you come back to your hotel, you feel like you are never going to wear your clothes again, because they are so dirty.

I think for tomorrow, I need to learn how to bargain and cheat… We are going shopping again in the French concession.

Day 19/63

We got up extra early to get the 7:22 Shinkansen to Nagoya. Our friend, Alex was waiting for us in the station. He is Jonathan’s friend from the Anime business and we visited him and his lovely Japanese family in Nagoya two years ago as well. First stop of the day was to post off 12 kg of souvenirs and shit that we had mastered together in the last week or so. This is still a Japanese holiday, so we were a bit worried about none of the posts being open. However, Alex knew that there was an ‘emergency’ counter open in the main post office and so we put together boxes of yukatas, rice bowls, trays, books, comics, t-shirts, totoros, whiskey and whale meat… Those are just examples on what it is that we wanted to export. Over the last three weeks we’ve sent around 25kg of stuff back home. And as expensive as you think it might be, it’s still a lot cheaper than the Finnish postal system.

Alex had chosen to take us to see Meijimura, a whole theme park of Meiji era buildings and railways & such, which is about an hour drive from Nagoya. The park turned out to be a great place. There is tens of buildings that have been brought from all over Japan and replanted around this area of a lake(?) and some mountains. Inside the buildings you can read about its history or get a guided tour. We only visited maybe 20% of the houses, because of the limited amount of time, but we did get to squeece in a post office, old hotel from the middle of Tokyo, a church, a couple of prisons, a kabuki theatre, a photographer’s house, a doctor’s house, a lighthouse, a ride in the bus, the tram and a steam train, and the judo hall. There might be some that I forgot, but this is clearly a place where you could spend more than one day. The architecture is beautiful and it wasn’t very crowded, either. A perfect place to spend a day.

My personal favorite of course was the judo hall, which had tons of tatamis and a lovely, old wooden floor. I did some hokei, but unfortunately couldn’t stay for a long time. The photographer’s house was also great: It had one of those triangle shaped roofs, except one side was a glass ceiling. This was because of there not being any electricity at the time and they needed studio lighting. I personally think that natural light is always better, so if I had a lot of money, that would be something my house would also have.

Alex has got three half-Scottish, half-Japanese children: Isla, Kainan and Sasha. My husband and I both agreed that having three Finnish or English kids with us through out a long day, walking around – it would have been a nightmare. But these three are specialy well behaved and caused no trouble and were actually excited about the history – which apart from sweets and ice cream, was the only thing that the park could offer. If we ever have kids, I am sending my husband to get lessons from Alex about raising children.

Later on, we met Reiko, Alex’s wife at their home in Nagoya and got the most amazing cultural experience of them showing us how to do taco-yaki for dinner. Taco in Japanese means ‘Octobus’. However, ours were filled with sausage, cheese and chikuwa (fish paste) rather than real tacos, but never mind. Tacoyaki itself is something that I could see Finns getting excited about. It cooks on a hot plate with little round bundles, on top of the table, so everyone can participate into the cooking and seeing it get done. The Yakis are little round bundles of something close to a pancake/okonomiyaki mix with the filling inside. Now we only have to find a pan like that in Finland, or export one in our luggage;)

Overall, it was a lovely Nagoya day and always a pleasure to see Alex and his wonderful family.

Day 18/63

No offence to the capital of Japan, but I can see many more interesting ways of spending time in Japan, than to spend it in Tokyo.

We took a reserved seats in a Shinkansen for 18 minutes from Shin-Yokohama and boom! We are in Tokyo. Neither one of us really wanted to see particularly anything there, so we did what we normally do – looked for bookshops and samurai statues. There is a great, huge bookshop ‘The Maruzen’ right outside the Tokyo station. That is where we headed.

Normally when we are in these bookshops, I try to find some photo books to leaf through while my husband digs into the world of history books in Japanese. My Japanese is on the level of please and thank you, and perhaps “What is that?”, but no way near reading a book. Maruzen however, has a bid collection of English books, so I spent some time leafing through actual books. I found the Japanese equivalent to Nigella Lawson (English tv cook that I like) and decided to get her book just in case I feel adventurous back home by cooking some Japanese when I get back. Normally what I like to do after returning from travels is to have a sort of a soiree for my friends or family, to show them pictures from the trip and cooking them the local food. Of course if you come back from Germany, this means a trip to the Lidl with some beer and sauerkraut.

After book hunting (some of which we decided to order from Amazon later on to be delivered without a fuzz of posting them, straight to our homes), we walked along the emperial palace park to see a statue of samurai, Masashike Kusunogi on horse back. It was a good day, so we decided to try to get some author pictures of my husband for his book on the samurai, which is coming out in Autumn 2010. He just finished it before we left for this trip, but the publishers take a year to print it…

After walking back to the station, we then hopped onto the JR circle line to this park called Ueno, where thousands of Japanese were spending their holidays. There was a zoo near by, but we were much more keen on another samurai statue of Saigo Takamori. He has however comically brought his dog on the morning walk in his bathrobe with him into this statue – I wonder if he would have approved that one? Doesn’t quite give out the impression of a fearless warrior now does it?

Lunch opportunities in Ueno were poor and expensive, and even as the Chinese set meal in a delightful environment of a tea house would sound good to you, it certainly wasn’t impressing us very much. The food was tasteless noodles that didn’t go down well. We decided to walk off to see where we would end up, towards a temple that had many lanterns. We stumbled upon some pottery shops selling cheap kitchen stuff, which is where I decided to risk it and buy some. Perhaps they’ll survive to Finland in one piece, perhaps they won’t. Couple of Euros for a handmade sushi plate though, I was willing to take some chances.

Temple of the huge lantern was as crowded as Woodstock. There were stalls of tat sellers all around it on this area called Asakusa, which might sound amusing for a while, but after you’ve bought the essential series of sushi fridge magnets and blue wigs, you want to get the train back to the hotel. This is exactly what we did.

Tokyo to me, doesn’t provide anything that I couldn’t get from somewhere else in Japan. It’s a big city with big city’s problems. And even as it has the occasional parks, you’d still meet such crowds that I am happy not to live there. I think only now, I truly understand why Japanese act the way they do in Finland – running around like children if they see some forest. I would as well. A little nature is a great thing. My visit to Tokyo has made me appreciate the town where I live. Because for me it’s the best place in the world.

Day 17/63

I have one word to say about traveling in the Yokohama area on a national holiday: Struggle. It’s the silk road week or whatever here, and attached to the emperor’s birthday, it means they get like three days off this week as bank holidays. What do the mad Japanese do on their national holidays? They scamper up and see sight just like the rest of the world.

My husband has written a book about Admiral Togo and it so happens that the flag ship of his famous fleet, the HJMSS Mikasa is a tourist attraction around here on a place called Yokosuka. As it sounds like a cute place on its name, it’s actually an American naval base. After world war two the Americans decided to use Japan as an unsinkable air-craft carrier and have had bases here ever since.

There was two submarines and several battleships at sight when we first arrived to the Yokosuka station, but finding Mikasa took us a good 45 minute walk with a detour to ask a local policeman. It seems there is not a day we don’t actually talk to the police… I don’t know if that’s good or bad now.

Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa is an impressive thing, even if it is kind of on the ground now. Apparently it had become a museum a lot before the WWII, but the Americans saw it from the air and accidentally bombed the hell out of it. This was conveniently wiped from the history boards in the museum layers of the Mikasa of course.

Admiral Togo sunk most of the miserable Baltic fleet of the Russians back in 1905, which seems to have been quite a row of cock-ups with the Russians. First of all, if you are the Russians, why would you take your incompetent and very poor fleet from the Baltic sea, sail it all the way around Africa… With a very little amount of friendly harbours on the way… If you ask me, the Russians did get what they deserved. However, historically the Mikasa was a very crucial turn in sea battle history, because it actually got a radio signal of where the russian fleets was located, where it was going and what speed. And therefore Admiral Togo could easily wait in Korea and surprise the whole fleet from two sides when it was desperately trying to get to Vladivostok where it could have refueled and prepared for battle.

While walking on board this massive battleship, it came to my mind how fast the technology had grown since the times of San Juan Babtista… There was around 200 men in the crew of this ship as well, but they lived much more comfortably, and had a lot more now a days feeling to it all. But then again, this ship was built in Brittain. Japan even at the end of the 19th centrury did not have the capasity to built their own ships. They had just completed hundreds of years pretending that the world outside Japan did not exist. So no wonder they were behind on things. As we wanted to take the whole piss of the Admiral togo area, we also bought Admiraali beer, which has been the only way Finnish people know that he existed… I think our Gaijin behaviour of the day award went to our little photosession of the beer.

You could see the huge Gaijin influence that a naval base causes around the Yokosuka area… Foreigners were absolutely everywhere, a hotel even had a fucking statue of liberty on its top. Now this was a thing, I should have kept in mind when we went to lunch to a place, which was called “the curry house”. I have previously have had the hotness of the curry about 3 in scale of 1 to 10 in Japan, and it has gotten me nowhere. So when my husband said he wants his level 8, then I said, why not. This was something I started regretting when I read the menu: It said that anyone who takes level 5 is going to suffer serious consequinces and if you don’t finish a whole portion of level 5, then you can’t go to levels 6 to 10… So ouch, that hurt! But it was a lovely curry, one of the best I’ve had. Mushrooms and keema on top. I finished about 4/5 of my portion and was very proud of myself.

We were up pretty early today, so after killer lunch we head to *another* day’s work. This one, was a gigantic Buddha. We arrived to the Kamakura station, where around half of Japan and a lot of foreigners had decided to go today and waited 20minutes to get a seat on a bus. Which we did, even though there was so many people on the bus that they had to hold their breath to fit in. After that, the bus took around an *hour* to get to the Buddha, which was a 30 minutes walk at tops, but I really did not mind. This was a chance for nap number three for me. I sleep in all the ways of traffic quite happily.

We got to this Buddha on the same time as probably around 2000 other people, which to me, was just a great photo opportunity. It’s remarkable, after a while, how the people look with their identical Keitais (cell phone) risen towards the target for a picture. Such fun you can have… I decided we’d walk back to the station as it was clearly not a good idea to take any more busses or trains in the area. We were lucky to get back with three different trains and several lines to Shin-Yokohama, which took around an hour from the Buddha. I must say, that a capital traffic is obnoxious. It’s like London, but also you don’t know any of the names of the stops because they are all in Japanese. So I recon if I had to do what we’ve just done on my own, it would be as going from Stanstead to the centre of London, to St.Paul’s cathedral and back, blind folded.

ps. I am currently in China, where facebook does not work, so this is all the updates that I am still alive…

Day 16/63

We left Koriyama for Shin-Yokohama. In order to get there though, we needed to go through Tokyo. Shin-Yokohama is only there because of the shinkansen station. If we had stayed in Yokohama, we would have had to go through Shin-Yokohama anyways, so it was a very organized decision not to drag our luggage through that fuzz.

Our hotel in Shin-Yokohama is the Prince, which is a huge around 40 floors of hotel rooms complex. There is a queuing system to get to the reception, and around 10 elevators which will take you to the 32nd floor (where our room is) approximately faster than my elevator at work takes me to the 5th floor…

Our mission for the day was to check out Yokohama China Town, which is apparently the second biggest outside China. Yes it was huge. But unfortunately, at the end, it’s nothing but restaurants and tat for tourists and one pathetic little temple. Well, impressive temple, but in any case, I’ve been more impressed in my life. However, the food was excellent and I had a great time with my camera walking around the harbour area.

It’s a national holiday for the next three days which is kind of unfortunate and makes all the places to be absolutely booked out… I mean, even parks are seriously crowded. Yokohama is the most London city that I’ve ever met (besides London, I mean…) It’s got a kind of a river thing going on, with big buildings around it, amusements of all kinds and even a Yokohama-eye, a fareswheel.

It’s considerably more hot here again. It’s evident that we are no longer in the North, but now in the East of Japan, as they let you know. Our very carefully planned schedule gave us a needed time to breathe in the North and now we are charged up and ready to spear more heat. Yokohama is the second biggest city of Japan. So big in fact that it’s grown to be the same city as the biggest city in Japan. Which is 18 minutes away on the Shinkansen.

This concluded out time in Yokohama, nothing very special happened there concerning the samurai… However, tomorrow we are travelling close by for some more research in the form of Admiral Togo’s warship. As we’ve completed our missions so effectively, we will get a day in Tokyo. My husband is apparently letting me decide where to go there… I suppose some wikipedia time is called for.

Day 15/63

Today, we went to Aizu-Wakamatsu. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, ever since I heard that such a wacky name for a town existed. As usual, we were there to do research on a book. This time it’s the book about Samurai republic, which lasted for six months in Hakodate back in 1869.

A very red train with weird, red, legless creature as the symbol, takes us to Aizu. There is some Genkis (Japanese girls) dressed into pink, obviously performing some sort of function in the train. What back in the western world would have been a fund raiser – in here is a free raffle, where we get to take a small tag, rip it open and win something. Mine was empty, but I still got a cookie. My husband however gets a small bottle of Sake, which means we’ll have our first sake in Japan tonight in our hotel room… We are also given out some things like a map of the area, some information pampflets and a fan with the red, foxy creature. The Japanese never stop to amaze me… They just give out things:) This kind of spirit has also infected me and I’ve been buying small presents to people back home.

In Aizu-Wakamatsu, we decide to take the local ‘Loople’ the town bus, which takes us to all the two target places that we have mapped out for ourselves. This city bus is called the ‘Haikara’, which in Finnish means ‘Stork’, the bird that brings babies. Haikara first takes us to the castle, which in my knowledge of half-a-dozen Japanese castles that I’ve visited in my life, would be quite a kick-ass level of a castle. However, we are unlucky with the weather and have a very clowdy day, so we are lucky to get any pictures at all… Of course most of the time the pictures in my husband’s books are in black and white, so clowdy days do not matter… But I am personally a big fan or color pictures of Japan.

This castle is not on a hill, like the Sendai one, and so it has been destroyed and conquered. This one is a replica. We climb up the pagoda-like construction, way up to the top, to see the city view and of course also the mountains. Samurais here had particularly interesting helmets on, with a golden symbol of some kind stuck in their foreheads. As Date Masamune of Sendai had half a moon, the main guy here seems to have had a kanji, an ‘ai’, which means ‘love’.  There is a tv-series made of that era, so the castle is half filled with tv series posters and autographs of the stars… We do some tat shopping while we still can, I bought some bowls to be sent back home and some tat for my female relatives. Then it’s time to jump to the Haikara again and climb a mountain.

This mountain is the place where the white tigers, 19 very young (16 years old or so) boys comited suicide because they thought the smoke coming from their castle meant they had to do that. Thank god for modern communication devices, huh? There is a shrine area where you can light some insents to them and the smoke is not fading. The story is very sad, but to my opinion, they did die because they were just kids, because they were Japanese, and the Japanese always play by the rules. If someone tells you to kill yourself, you say: “sword trough stomach or beheading?”…

Our time in Aizu-wakamatsu may not have been the best in weather wise, but once again, a good day to learn about the different ways that people can think in this world. Back on red fox train, we see one of the most gorgeous sunsets over the mountains I have ever seen.

Day 14/63

We left Sendai in the morning to head for Koriyama, where our main purpose was to leave our luggage while we’ll go to Aizu-Wakamatsu tomorrow. Our hotel room check-in was at 3pm, so we had some time to look into the city around before that. There is not a whole lot going on, how ever, we stumbled onto a weird drumming noise that was coming from the station. Perhaps around a 100 policemen were squatting on the public entrance, listening into these crazy kids playing their impressive instruments. This was nothing but a press release about traffic accidents and how they just don’t want to have any more of them.

In fact, they have come up with a whole day, the 30th of September, where NO ONE is allowed to die in traffic in the whole of Japan. Why this needs drumming… Well, we’ll never know. Perhaps it was to increase the unified spirit of the police or something. After squatting and drumming, they all were giving out a bag of wonders to the public around the area. It included some pictures with helpful advice like ‘be aware of ninjas’ and ‘fasten your seat belt’.

An elderly officer came to me with his bag of wonders and caught into a conversation with my husband about why are we in Koriyama, why he speaks such a good Japanese and where are we from. Of course i have head variations of this conversation about every day with all kinds of members of the public, the waiters in restaurants, taxi drivers and even with other police men… SO I kind of know what is said in there. But at the same time, I feel my Japanese is gradually improving.

Last time when we were in here, I didn’t know the difference between Udon, Ramen and Soba. I had no idea what kind of noodles I wanted, that is. This time I can read at least half of hirakanas/katakanas, I think, and I can carry on very small conversations. I recall words that I have forgotten, but suddenly now remember what they mean, like “kippu” (ticket)… I can even get my favorite onegiri, which is ’sea chicken btw’ (the tuna mayo one). I impress myself because I have done nothing to improve my language skills since my classes ended back in 2005, when I completed as much Japanese as you can do in my university back in Jyväskylä.

For the rest of the day, we did some work and went to have some Ramen in one of those restaurants which you won’t know are restaurants, if you don’t actually read Japanese… Outside they have a ‘noren’ (which means a cloth that you hang to cover your door halfly, where you can walk through), which usually says ‘udon’ (big fat soup noodles) or something like that. And inside, it looks like someone’s living room. Tourists just have no chance of finding these places. The food is usually great and much cheaper than on the street by the station. This is why my husband and I have began to wonder – perhaps other people don’t travel as cheap as we do in Japan either. I mean in China, it is obvious that they try to trick you for making you pay the tag price instead of the bargained price, but even in here, it also really pays to know the language.

Day 13/63

Sendai sightseeing day

Our day started with a train journey, just like many of our days in Japan. Our targets for the day were: A temple, a grave, a museum and a castle. We took a JR line to where Tsunenaga’s grave was suppose to be, by a temple. He died two years after returning from his mission to Europe and Manila – the cause of his death is unknown. Perhaps he died of illness, but what would be much more likely, was that he had been found guilty of Christianity and slaughtered like many of his kind back then in Japan.

We had some slight problems finding the temple. This was due to the fact that Japanese decide randomly to turn their maps upside down, just to make life difficult. You know, north is down and so  on. Once we did find the stair path to the right temple (you wouldn’t believe how many there are…) we jumped through a herd of grannies poking their bums in the air, performing samu (cleaning) of the whole area. We ran into a man called Ken O-uchi, who was the son of the high priest of this temple and were lucky enough to get a private showing of a painting inside the temple, illustrating Tsunenaga’s trip with San Juan Babtista to see the pope. Ken san’s wife and daughter had gone to Cardiff for two years to study English. I baffled my mind around this fact: Was it that the daughter had decided to go and the mother didn’t allow her to go alone? I have no idea how the Japanese think, as had become evident on this trip.

After scouting Tsunenaga’s grave sight and his memorial, we found ourselves in the tube line back to the centre of Sendai. We had a curry for lunch on our way to the castle, which we decided to walk to, past the river that goes through Sendai. On the castle grounds I sighted a statue of Tsunenaga and the whole climb to the castle was filled with grandeur of big stone walls and gates. However, the castle itself is very unimpressive. World war two destroyed it and for some weird reason (the Japanese normally don’t act like this) they had not rebuilt it in its former glory. However, they did have a whole computer animation and auditorium built to show off how cool the castle area had been. The also english-translated story told a very different version of history, where Masamune started off a new era of trade for Japan… Which is of course a load of bollocks as he failed in his mission to do so.

We were a bit walked out at this point of the journey so decided to get the town’s sightseeing bus back to the centre. Its friendly name was ‘Loople’ and it took us to the arcades in order to perform the last bits of tat shopping the the form of yukatas and some studio Ghibli crap for a friend of mine. Can you believe that they sell aquariums with the whole Laputa built inside? Poor fish. These tanks were so small that I wasn’t too happy with the animal treatment there…

Later on, I went outside for some scenic photography without Jonathan, but I do believe I have a thing or two to learn still about shooting nightskylines. Well, I’ll try again in Tokyo, or perhaps Yokohama. Maybe I should take some more lessons from Stuck in Customs, aka the best HDR photographer that I’ve come across.

Later on that night my husband was in the bath, clearly a bit drunk. He yelled at me: “Did I hear you farting”, and as I denied, he continued: “The Japanese old ladies let out massive farts in the tat shop queue today!” Now there is a thought I could have lived without knowing.

16th of September

Day 13/63

Today started well, my husband dragged me out of bed and we were on our way to Ishinomaki by nine. We stopped by at the station to pick up reserved seats for some of the shinkansens that we’ll be travelling on in the days to come. We’ve got two weeks of Japan rail passes, which cost us around 350 of euros/pounds each, but it means that we can travel on JR lines as much as we want, including the Shinkansen.

It’s about an hour to Ishinomaki. While on the train, we got to see the Matsushima airbase, where some pilots were practising their flight movements – beautiful.Then 20minute taxi to see the San Juan Babtista, which was our main target of the day. My husband is thinking of writing a book about this guy who was basically send against his will in the 17th centrury to built the 500 ton Galleon and sail it to Europe to see the pope. This man was called Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga. He was sent to Europe by Lord Masamune of Sendai who had an evil plan to try and persuade the Spannish (Hispania as it was then called) empire to trade with him and in return, he’d let the people of Sendai to be turned into Christians.

I visited the ship, San Juan Babtista, or actually the well made replica of this gorgeous piece that now served as a tourist and school children attraction. It’s a tall ship that you don’t really see in the Tall ships race back home in Turku every year, gorgeous and huge. The fact that it actually took 180 people to Mexico and Philippines was really astonishing to me. It had three levels of living/goods sections and at the back, I think around four.

This guy Tsunenaga must have had a lovely seven years on sea trying to complete a mission that was doomed to fail when he left in 1613. Japan on those times had convinced that Christianity was destroying their own culture, which is why they slaughtered everyone who wouldn’t deny the fact that the Christian god exists by swearing on a plate. My husband wrote a book about Shiro Amakusa, who was a young, Christian boy leader samurai, who fought to the bitter end back in 17th century for the Christianity. We investigated him on our previous visit in Japan and went through Kyushu for that.

Japanese are a cruel kind when it comes to torture and death, which you probably know… However, boiling people alive in hot springs, crusifying them and letting the tide then drown them, burning people alive in their straw rain coats and buring them up to their necks alive and then stomping on their heads with a horse while their wives were watching – were just a couple of the charming examples on what would happen to you if you had *anything* to do with Christianity in Japan, in the 17th century.

Despite of the excellent visit to the San Juan Babtista, we’ve had a bit of a low day. This was due to a lost wallet with four credit cards and a huge amount of cash inside. In an occasion like this, it’s very difficult to enjoy the day as it is – I even if had Whale on a stick as my lunch…

We made a visit to the local police station, where we completely fucked up their computer system, as they didn’t really get Gaijin who loose their wallets… Like, ever. That was about half an hour when they took all our details, and another hour on the train back to Sendai. I cancelled my one card in three minutes in the internet. Jay for Finnish banking system. Don’t come and tell me that Sampo is a bad bank… I already ordered a new one as well. It wasn’t quite as simple for my husband’s cards though, due to the difficulties we had for not having a working cell phone at the moment. Who knew, that the number *before* the actual number that you need to dial before you get out of our land line hotel phone to abroad is:  0-001010 and then the actual number… This took about an hour and a half. Finns are efficient, what can I say.

After all this upset and faffling around, we decided to have a 7-11 dinner with some booze at the safety of our hotel room. Sushi, salad and stringy cheese with wine… On a day like this you have to look at the perspective: 1. Neither one of us is dead. 2. We are not ill or injured 3. We still have access to money, 4. We’ve got our passports, our tickets and our railpasses (which btw, saved us a ton of money since we can get as many seating tickets on the Shinkansen as we want) So to be far. It could be worse. And as one of our very best friends told us before we left: “There will be a day when you reach the bottom. For me it was when I woke up on the beach with a crab eating my hand.” So could be worse, there’s no crabs in this hotel room yet:)

15th of September, I am catching up.

Day 11/63

It must have been the fastest ever I’ve gotten off a hotel room. I woke up at 9:28 only realising that our train from Hakodate to Sendai was to leave in one hour and 12 minutes. Before that I had planned to shower, go to the post office to send one package to Australia, one back home to Finland *and* have my breakfast. It seemed like a doomed possibility, since most of our stuff was around the room yet and no packing had commenced. However, I can be organized and the post office was just 40 metres away from our hotel, so we managed to be at Hakodate station with the luxury of 20 minutes to spare, buy our saru soba lunch for the train and get some Pocari Sweat as well.

The train from Hokkaido to Honshu goes underneath the sea in a tunnel so long that there is actually a station underneath. What one does underneath the sea, I wonder… Perhaps takes care of the tunnel? We changed the normal train to shinkansen at Hachinohe and were in Sendai for about five hours.  Our hotel in Sendai is the same as in Hakodate, the Chisun grand. There is even a Lawson near by.

Sendai is supposed to be the most beautiful area of Japan. We got the only room in our hotel that is both meant for two people and has internetto in it. Fastest connection so far btw, I caught up with my picture uploads as well as my television, kind of. Internet really means a safe haven now a days.

We went out for dinner to the local Teramachi, which means a shopping arcade (it’s called the ‘CLIS ROAD’ btw… Not exactly GLIS as my reasech group’s name but close enough). After some city ramble, we located a rolling sushi place, which I think my husband chose because he could pretty much take the night off translation business and we can just have whatever we want from the plates floating by. Everything was very cheap of course, around 100yen a plate (75cents), so my dinner was about 5 euros, even though on that amount of Sushi in Finland, you would have easily ended up paying 20euros. Easy.

We also checked out the tat shopping possibilities and came across a rather high quality tat shoppy which sold samurai things and wooden plates and stuff. Jonathan almost bought some more yukatas, japanese style bathrobes, which he has completely worn off since the last time he bought them in 1992. Finland is a land of saunas, so we are eventually wanting to get some to ourselves as well as our potential guests to our so far potential sauna that we hopefully someday have…

Sendai seems like a busy city. I still haven’t seen enough to make up my mind if it’s the most beautiful place in Japan or not.