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 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 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.