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 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.

Day 10/63

After such an efficient day in Hakodate yesterday, we bounced out of bed before seven and were on our way to Sapporo by 8:30 train. Morning excersises included walking to the station and scouting the station area for yet another memorial (read: like a statue, but crap). We did manage to find a small althar for Hechi Kata Toshiso, a samurai that killed himself at the battle of Hakodate at that particular spot (they had lost the war).

I love Japanese trains. Three hours and we were in Sapporo. Lucky enough, I sleep anywhere, so I just blinked and I was there… Our mission in the beer city was to find a proper Ainu (the Northern People) museum, but first we stopped for a gorgeous lunch at ‘Taj Mahal’, where my vegetable curry with cheese naan was so far the best lunch I’ve had. And remember that yesterday we had Viking buffet that was pretty awesome. I am however, very addicted to curry and this was a heavenly place. Cost us about 800yen (6euros each)…

Then we were off to find the Ainus… This proved out to be one quest where mr. cock-up paid us a visit of “we are not open on Mondays”. Reminding that getting there from Hakodate took a train of 3hours, a walk of 30minutes, a metro of 20 minutes, a bus of 38 minutes… So almost like we popped into somewhere like Saarijärvi from Helsinki for the day, only to discover that what we wanted to see was closed. I didn’t let it bring me down, we did get to see the amazing Hokkaido countryside and the neverending mountains with their green covered hills. I stumbled on a great field of something yellow as well – for me, the trip was paid with that one picture there… And the Ainu museum had huts outside, so we could break laws and scout the Ainu toilets.

The Ainus took baby bears when they were little, raised them in cages and then killed them for food. However, my husband tells me that you can’t really eat bear meat because of some of the insects or whatever that live in their skins… This was however not the only way of their food gathering. They had efficient fishing methods like nets and spears and on their spare times they embroided all these incredibly beautiful patterns on their skin coats and furs. Maybe I was an escimo in a previous life, I find this all very fashinating. We were looking at the Japanese fish movements in the northern seas the other day and stumbled on to the fact that if the Ainus and other Northern people really went fishing as far as it looks, they must have found America… Also I find fashinating that there is no other conversation about any other continent in the world to be found except America.

Our legs were numb by sitting in a very smallish place for two in a bus to Sapporo station from the middle of no where where the Ainus were not at home. So we decided to use our last two hours to make an effort to check out the Sapporo beer factory and the gifto shoppus that were attached to it. By the time we walked back to the station (which btw is about the same as Kyoto station – fucking huge and complicated to find anything in it), we had a fast Ramen dinner before our train back to Hakodate.

Today’s learned lessons included: Sapporo is the capital of Hokkaido, 2 million people living in it. I enjoyed my short visit there, but very much the same as on my first visit to Japan – I like Hakodate better than Sapporo, like back then I liked Nagasaki better than Kyoto. I still stick to those principles. In three days my husband and I have decided that Hakodate is an excellent city where we’d both very happily live in. Plus, we live much more cheaply here than back home. Lunch today was 6euros each. Dinner was 5. Taxi home from station was 5 pounds… Makes you really think – what kind of places are London and Jyväskylä, if even Japan is cheaper.

Day 9/63 of the RTW

We’ve been in Japan for ten days. Doesn’t seem like, but so it is. Today was our extreme Hokkaido sightseeing day. In the morning after well deserved sea chicken (tuna-mayo) onegiri (ricecake) breakfast, we head for the hill. There was a couple of shrines, a statue of samurai and two churches, one orthodox, one supposedly christian. The Christians were having some sort of Sunday morning shindig, in which they played very gay songs, including the jungle song from Lion King… Good way to start a day.

It was looking like a rainy day at that point, so we had museums planned. We got to the previous Russian consulate, in which, in a very Japanese fashion, you can dress up into a russian woman… This meant BIG dresses and hair extensions with tacky jewelry and your picture taken with the reluctant husband collection who try to hide when the Barok concert is going on in the main hall… Quite amusing as it was, I felt like I was not here to see what the Russians are like… I can do that back home!

Next was the British consulate… The tat shop sold tacky tea cups and London tea shirts. This I can do even easier at home: Next! We had lunch at the harbour in a Viking restaurant. I am pretty sure that the selection of food had nothing to do with the vikings, but it was one of those ‘all you can eat in 60 minutes’ deals… The selection was awesome for a Finn as you can imagine. My favourite was calamari stuffed with rice while my husband happily showed down Japanese curry down his throat. There was tons of different kinds of scampi, prawns, tentacles, octobus, you name it… And sushi as well. I was quite a happy Finn after this fest.
After lunch our mission lead us to the ‘Ainu’ museum, which is a museum of Northern people on the area. This means basically the escimos of the northern islands. I don’t know why but I find these people utterly fasinating. Their patterns of clothing decorations are their very own, they are no Japanese, Nore Chinese, Nor Russian. If I were a historian, I think I would probably do research on the Northern cultures. Somehow those have always facinated me… There was a wooden tray been sold in the gift shop, but was not mad enough to pay 120 euros for it, however cool it would be to have an Ainu plate at one’s home…

Museum number one after lunch was quite dull. We have so far figured out that if the Japanese call something ‘a memorial hall’, it means ‘like a museum, but we’ve ran out of things to show’ so there is probably a video, some posters and possibly some chairs to sit on… In any case, at this point we realised that we were just going to do the whole Hakodate in one day and head to Sapporo tomorrow.

Quick trip back to the hotel and then off to the great, huge pentagon fortress on the other side of the town. Hakodate has a good system of trams, so we took one of those. There is a tower looking over the pentagon, which all and all was a great experience, even if it was just a view and some gifto shoppus. I bought some samurai tat to be sent home and came to the conclusions that some things *are* too huge to fit even to my wide angle lens. Perhaps I will get a fisheye sometime…

We also visited the actual fortress and the park that is in it, and the museum of Northern seas that was next to the tower. Museum of Northern seas was great value for money: Real stuffed Polar bear, Valrus, Seals, Fish… You name it. My previous surname had the word ‘Kuutti’ (means a baby seal in Finnish) in it, so I am always overly enthusiastic about seals. They are so cute!
Sun was going down when we reached the Hakodate station and I finally got my two weeks rail pass. We bought tickets to Sapporo for tomorrow morning at 8:30. It is three hours one way, but as it’s not costing us anymore money, I thought – why not? It’s unlikely that I’ll be in Hokkaido very much in my life. If not at all after this. Even if my husband and I bought thought that we’d happily live here. I think Finns would be happy to visit – it’s cool enough and there’s not as many people as in the southern parts of Japan… Who knows, maybe one day.

Day 8/63

My husband and I left my family memebers to Tadotsu and took the morning train to Takamatsu. From takamatsu, we took the bus to the airport. I was looking at postcards in the gifto shoppu when I saw a familiar face: You know how in the middle of a crowd of Japanese, you are not sure if you recognise someone or not and you question your capability to know if it actually is someone you know, or just someone who looks exactly the same as someone you know… This was one of those cases. This time I was right: It was Kawashima sensei, who was on his way to Tokyo on a seminar and came to talk to us briefly on the way. Kawashima sensei visited Finland back in 2001. I think I’ve seen him since in Paris and perhaps also in Italy… Time does fly by.

I slept through most of the legs of our flights, there was a case of turbulence between Tokyo and Hakodate, but I didn’t really let it worry me too much. At Haneda airport, the toilet boots have got their individual screens that tell you what is on sale… I wonder if the squatting toilets also have those and do people hang out in the boots more because of them… Japanese are obsessed with toilets. Even the hotel toilets start their own theme songs or water sounds to cover the possible noises one might have in the toilet. I may not be completely happy with someone listening on me to pee, but for god’sake, it should be a natural sound!

We were the only Gaijin (foreigners) in the plane as can be expected and as we landed on Hokkaido, I immediately thought this was going to be a very different experience from Shikoku… For one, no vending machines at sight. Obviously less need to drink up, when it’s colder. For two, the weather was seriously colder. We digged up our long trousers, socks and even rain coat. I was happy that all these big items we carry around are not going to be just luggage. Plus it’s seriously easier to do power sightseeing in a colder weather.

Our hotel, the Chisun Grand is near the harbour, close to the cable car that takes you to the mountains. We can see both the sea and the mountain from our window. As you probably have also noticed, the room provided us with a long lost internet connection, which meant that I could seriously upload some pictures. There is a coin usable washing machine and “Lawson” the seven eleven at the corner. This supermarket sold gorgeous packed sushi, anime magazines and even stringy cheese. I felt like I had entered a comfort zone in our trip. Trip advisor said that Chisun Grand is a little bit away from the action, but our smallish walk to find dinner showed that it’s actually very close to everything, there is even a statue of a Samurai on our street. Hurrah.

We had weird curry noodles for dinner and walked around town in a small rain. The feeling that my husband got was that the town was a little sad, it has got a lot of western looking buildings, but not really a lot of people around… My feeling however was, that this is a home away from home. Climate, the limited amount of culture, the small town feeling – these are all what I feel is home. What can I say: I’m a nothern girl.