4. Leaving Hokkaido and heading for the west coast of Honshu

just an elegant front

slumming it in a Shinkansen

With the six weeks we have available we don’t have to rush everywhere, although we often seem to do so.  As we left Hokkaido at about 8.15, we were heading south using trains again, express, Shinkansen, then another express, for what was a long day’s travelling to Akita, close to the west coast of Honshu.   Anyway Heather had booked a nice traditional place for a couple of days with the hot-pool Onsen, despite originally having trouble finding somewhere.   

mother and daughter

What could possibly go wrong ?   Well, we didn’t know exactly how to get to the hotel from the station and arrived at about 5.15 at the Tourist Information Desk to ask.  Turned out that the hotel was in Akita Prefecture, not Akita the town and lay about a hundred miles away close to where we’d passed three hours earlier on the train.  You should have heard us laugh.  Well, the two ladies in the information place (miserably understaffed by Japanese standards) sprang into action.  The difficulty Heather originally had booking somewhere was because a conference was underway and hotel rooms were as rare as hen’s teeth.   One of the ladies asked what our budget was and began phoning hotels, having first cancelled the booking at where we thought we were staying.  After about twenty minutes she’d found one right on our budget, a business style hotel only a five minute bus ride away.  Armed with directions for where the bus stop was, which number to get, a map with the route drawn on it and how much the fare would be, off we went.  As we walked in, the lobby was lightly populated with businessmen in suits and ties.  We however looked a little the worse for wear after nine hours travelling, with our walking boots, rucksacks on our backs and perversely, small backpacks on our fronts.  Three receptionists in classic very smart uniforms watched us walk up to the desk.   Just on one hour from when our train had pulled into Akita station we were showered and changed and ready for dinner.

 

Akita is where the Japanese dog breed originally came from.  We didn’t see any but why should we.  If you went to Airedale or Dalmatia would you expect to spot one of those there ?  We didn’t even really want to be in Akita but it was much bigger than Kakunodate, an old town with preserved Samurai class houses about thirty minutes train ride away which we had decided was worth a visit.  And so it was.  This area was really off the westerner’s tourist route.  

Our hotel restaurant had a
Japanese menu with no translation into anything else and one local restaurant, called Raclette (a Swiss cheese meal) which we looked at only served steak.  The only non-orientals we saw in the entire two days we were there were at the tourist office, one Russian man and one Egyptian woman.   In Kakunodate the following day we saw only two westerners, Kevin from Australia and a young English woman who actually asked for my blog address.  So if you did use it and you’re reading this, I’m talking about you, Lizzie. 

two shots of those old Samurai Class houses in Kakunodate

Kakunoadate was a very interesting little place with a whole street of preserved houses which you could just wander up to and look in but not enter.  These were the classic old Japanese houses with rush mats on the floors, screens between rooms and virtually no furniture.  They really are austere looking places but wonderfully elegant.  The only food available in the town was Japanese and we each had a snack to keep us going.  Mine really was sticky rice in that it was exactly that, rice on a stick with soy sauce on it, as delicious as it sounds, like eating Twiglet flavoured well set wallpaper paste on a stick.  Mmmm yummy.   Many, many places in Japan make a big thing about what they have to offer in cherry blossom season, which unsurprisingly is cherry blossom.  Kakunodate’s offering is a two kilometre walk along the river lined both sides with old pink flowered cherries in Spring and dark green leaved cherries in October in what was now fairly gloomy light.   It must look tremendous when in the pink.

Cosplay in Niigata

Many hotels the world over claim to have an environmental conscience which mostly consists of notices saying  something along the lines of “if you are happy not to have your towels changed just leave them hanging up” .  This is universally ignored and we have never failed to have towels changed wherever we hang them.  There was a new twist for the environment at our very smart Akita hotel.  If we agreed not to have our room serviced for one day by switching a light on outside our room, our reward was a bottle of water each.  So we put on the light, had a redeemable card left which reception exchanged for, yes you guessed it, two plastic bottles of water.  Priceless.

the Japanese spaghetti harvest

We do tend to push the boundaries of our comfort zone somewhat on these trips and in what are quite non touristy areas of Japan, there are no concessions made to non-Japanese speakers.   All writing is in one of the two Japanese scripts with no translations.  So we’ll sometimes decide which bus stop is which by recognising that a place ends with ‘half a coathanger and an A upside down with an extra line through it’ for example.  It is quite fun really – when it works.  That isn’t to say that people are difficult, we’ve found that everybody we’ve come across is desperate to help.  Sometimes too much, for they never want to say that they don’t know or cannot help, this would be ‘losing face’.   In one place when we were trying to get a meal, one restaurant owner, who spoke no English, ran fifty yards or so to another restaurant where the owner did speak a little English to get him to come to us.  The tourist office or train information staff are unfailingly helpful, seem delighted to help and they are absolutely red hot on knowing their stuff.

a few of the steps

Our route was in a vaguely south westerly direction along the coast of Honshu for a while, stopping for a day at Tsuruoka, in order to go on a walk up a Buddhist pilgrim’s path and see the various buildings and stuff along the way.  It was something like 450 metres climb and 2,200 steps to the top with the huge advantage that the scheduled bus service that took us to the bottom had a route which picked us up at the top.  There were some very impressive temples at the top, a service underway and the biggest bell I’ve ever seen.  The path was through woods the whole way and the flight of stone steps was very impressive in its own right.  It was quite a haul up though.

on that Pilgrim's Walk

one of the temples at the top of the Pilgrim's Walk

Bus maps and train maps here are complicated but understandable with a little application, assuming that destinations are in English but the quite regularly seen public maps in the street have to be checked carefully because north is at the top only occasionally.  Sometimes south is at the top, sometimes west and now and again SW or NE.   So while it is true to say that just because we’re wandering we’re not lost, sometimes there are times between not being lost where we’re not exactly certain where we are.

Now, anyone who has been to Japan and is reading this will know that at some time I would have to write about the lavatories because they’re so, well Japanese.   Almost every one we’ve seen is a technological wonder connected to an electricity supply, a sort of electric chair.  Seats are heated, sometimes almost to radiator temperature, sprays of warmed water cause eyebrows to rise as they hit you in the fundament or a nearby location, some then have warmed air to dry you off.  A series of buttons on a control panel are to operate all this lot.  We’ve seen the seats in shops at up to £900 each.   A couple of times we’ve come across ones where the top lid of the lavatory cistern is a small hand basin and as you flush, water begins to run from a tap into the plugless basin.  This is actually how the cistern is filled so that the water you use to wash your hands becomes slightly grey water for the next flush.   Being Japanese, there’s no room for soap which seems to be the Japanese way.

Well, I seem to have got to the bottom of this blog so I’ll sort out some photos to go with it and sign off.

3. Hokkaido, that big island in the north

 

The garden in Sapporo at the old Municipal Building

The trip from Tokyo to Hokkaido turned out to be our first Shinkansen (bullet train) ride and it really did not disappoint.   As we waited in line on the platform for our train, this futuristic jaw-dropper pulled into Tokyo station, yes it has a Tokyo Station just like London doesn’t have a London Station.  Our train, a real stunner, looked like something designed for an attempt on the land speed record.  Shiny aquamarine top half, a pink stripe and then a white lower half, just like a long squeeze of toothpaste also designed for an attempt on the land speed record.   Despite the fact that we have a train driver I can’t help calling him the pilot, being in charge of such a sleek piece of

The Shinkansen

engineering and in a very smart uniform to match.  As the train halted, teams of cleaners scurried in cleaning, tidying, wiping surfaces and getting it suitably presentable (i.e. very smart) for us passengers.  Then they were off the train standing in a line alongside the coaches until at a nod from the supervisor they all trooped off.  Like most passengers we had reserved seats which were allocated when we got the tickets and each seat had more than enough legroom for me.   The train had arrived from the direction in which it was to leave and as it halted all the seats automatically turned to face the new direction of travel.   The seats could be turned as pairs by the passengers too so if four people travelled together they could face each other and if they’d had an argument they didn’t have to..  

Trains don’t seem to have a restaurant car although a trolley does come along always pushed by a woman.  Men drive the trains, men check the tickets.  It is a male dominated society so

Waiting patiently in line

you’ll wait a long time for the first male equivalent of Geishas available to entertain business women.  Anyway, food for long train journeys is traditionally a packed lunch in a Bento Box bought at the station.  A Bento Box is oval, about ten inches by five inches and two inches deep.  Compartments hold various Japanese tidbits and there is a great number of choices some of which are advertised as “based on a 100 year old design”.  Heather’s vegetarian one cost 850 Yen, a little under six pounds ($7.50) while I’d managed to secure myself a couple of cheese rolls from wonderful Andersens.

The journey was as smooth and as quiet as you might imagine, somewhat like a very smooth airplane flight or even a lift travelling horizontally, a feeling reinforced by the on-board staff who mostly looked like flight crew (what we used to call stewardesses).   The trains are very much on time and I saw a departure board stating that the approximate travel time for the journey was 4 hours 2 minutes.  This included the 14 miles or so for the tunnel between

the main island of Honshu and Hokkaido.   It was indeed a 4h 2m journey and our transfer time of 12 minutes for a change of platform to an express train was comfortable.  This express was to take us to Sapporo, the largest city on Hokkaido and our home for four days or so.  One of the reasons the trains run so punctually must be the organisation of passengers waiting in a queue where the doors are and the briskness of any stop.  Over the next couple of days or so on Hokkaido we travelled on a number of express trains and I timed one stop from the moment the doors opened, six people getting off to the moment the doors closed at 24 seconds.  It helps that train announcements and on the ‘electronic display board’ are in Japanese and English and tell you what the next stop will be, urge you to get ready and “not to talk too loudly so as not to annoy other passengers”.  

Just about as close as I
want to be to a bear

I thought it was time to say something about Japan the country.  Well, it’s an island nation lying off the coast of a huge continental area and certainly in recent years has had a bigger impact than the size of the country would be expected to.   Sound familiar ?  Compared to recent times it is in economic decline, especially compared to its near continental neighbours.  Sound familiar ??   Japan’s area is about  377,000 square kilometres compared to the UK’s 242,000 sq km (California 424,000 sq km) with about twice the population of the UK, coming in at around 127 million.   About 80% of the country is mountainous and there are large areas of fertile plains along much of the coast with a large proportion of the population, which is why the tsunami of 2011 had such a devastating effect.   Next lesson - double physics.

We’d booked an Airbnb in Sapporo which was a small apartment, giving us more space than a hotel, a chance to make our own breakfast at least and use the washing machine.   I have to say that Sapporo is not the most attractive city, with lots of apartment blocks pretty well everywhere but I did warm to it after a few days.  Fifteen minutes walk south of us was the main railway station with a huge shopping centre built around it with the tracks on the floor above ground level.   There were a lot of various shops with a big selection of restaurants, many with no English menu translation and all spread over several floors.  Not much English translation anywhere to be fair. 

Your starter for 10 points. Where are you ? Where do you want to go ? How will you know when you get there ?

Rising above the station is a block of perhaps fourteen stories of shops with a restaurant floor on the fourteenth.  Outside was the biggest camera store I’ve ever seen and to give an idea of size there must have over a hundred tripods on display and more camera bags than you could shake a monopod at.  

We saw very few non-orientals around, probably because we’re off the normal tourist route for westerners which is why I chose to say non-orientals because there are direct flights from China and South Korea to Hokkaido.  Outside Sapporo we saw virtually no westerners and locals everywhere will sometimes just strike up a conversation.  “Where you from”, “what about Blexit”, that sort of thing.  The difficulty is that there isn’t a natural end to such an exchange, it just sort of

My doughnut shop friend

peters out, like a conversation sometimes does when you visit someone in hospital.  I was sitting in a coffee shop and a young  Japanese girl engaged me in a chat while Heather was buying the coffee.  My new Japanese friend had enough English to just be understood but whose pronunciation was mostly difficult to understand.   Don’t for a moment think that’s a criticism, my Japanese is virtually non-existent.  I showed her my stock photos I carry on these trips of Milton Abbas and the family, she showed me pictures of her family including grandparents.  I did think that if I had current photos of my grandparents they’d be about 150 years old.  We had a photo taken and I don’t think anyone says ‘cheese’ here they just say “give me two fingers”.  People hold up two fingers or pose coyly for almost every picture.

Japan has volcanos and hot springs a’plenty in a number of places including Hokkaido.  We took a train and bus ride to visit one to the south of us called Noboribetsu.  Another travel variation for us was that you take a ticket as you get on towards the back of the bus and then pay when you get off at the front.   At the volcanic activity area there was

Noboribetsu

a hot stream which was used as a footbath.  Very nice too.  The whole area was all very dramatic and looking like a bad case of industrial pollution with sulphurous steam, ploppy boiling mud and vivid colours.  It did feel very different to other such areas we’d been to and this one had the added bonus that we had timed our visit well for the autumn colours.  The woods we walked through were like many we’ve seen here with nothing growing as an understorey except a dense and coarsely leaved two to three foot high bamboo.  I can’t understand how any trees get going at all and yes, we did see Japanese Knotweed but not a great deal of it.

 

Noboribetsu

Food has continued to be ‘interesting’ for us and we have explored the cuisines of Italy and India on a number of occasions.  I do have difficulty with a lot of the Japanese stuff because despite the amazingly realistic models of plates of food outside many restaurants it is still impossible to see what a lot of it is and titles and menus are often only in Japanese.  Even in bakeries it’s difficult to tell if what looks like a cake is sweet or savoury and generally it seems that savoury is more popular, although some of the kids seem to put away multiple doughnuts at a time.  As far as eating goes, some people would describe me as picky or fussy but I prefer discerning.  Heather, as a vegetarian is caught by so many things appearing to be vegetarian but they often end up being in a meat or fish stock.  Still, in Sapporo we did go to a very smart hotel for a lunchtime buffet which was delicious, varied and exquisitely presented.  Non-alcoholic drinks included for about £30 ($40) for both of us.

So to spice things up a little, we rented a car to drive further north for a look at the mountains and a bit of a walk.  Even though Japan drives on the left (also known as the correct side) it just didn’t feel quite right and I think I feel more at ease getting into a car and driving on the right when off travelling.  One thing we saw that was just so typically Japanese was that at the end of roadworks on the main road there was a sign showing a bowing man.  Still, driving was easy enough for both of us and the roads were pretty empty by British standards.  We went to a place called Asahikawa in central Hokkaido where the Tourist Office told us that autumn was over and the mountains were snow covered.  We consoled ourselves with tea and cake.  


This is also

an area that for some reason that we still haven’t fathomed out grows fields and fields of colourful garden flowers in bands of colour.  We thought that would all be gone by now but some fields were still there with about fifty feet wide strips of Salvia, then Lavender, then some Marigolds or deep red flowers.  Summer photos we saw had perhaps a dozen different vividly coloured bands next to each other.  It was certainly cold but we hadn’t realised that the winter snows really had beaten us to the mountains.   Sure enough as we drove out of town, mountain direction, there were snowy peaks in front of us.

Winter snows come to Hokkaido

1. Starting in Tokyo, that famous anagram of the former capital Kyoto

Well Japan at last !   After the journey of up at 4.30am, arrival at our hotel after 22 hours to be told we couldn’t book in for a further four hours it felt like ‘at last’.  So we went walkabout first and had our first ever Japanese meal, although I did pass on the crunchy fried conger eel bones and the boiled jellyfish.  Perhaps I will lose some weight after all.  We had been warned that tiny hotel rooms were a likelihood before we arrived and our experience so far is that Tokyo certainly wouldn’t be a good location for the World Cat-Swinging Championships.  Then after finally getting into our tiny hotel room we had a quick alarm set, 30 minutes kip and then out again to explore Asakusa in the evening.   We did have an early night though, going to bed at 32 hours after we got up in our Heathrow bedroom, sleeping for a restless 13 hours and nearly missing breakfast.   Our trouble on these trips is that we hit the ground running and keep running and every time we say to ourselves that we must slow down a bit, chill out, have a day doing nothing (well, very little anyway) now and again.  Perhaps this time, we have six weeks after all.

There is no standard definition of what to include in ‘a city’, we Brits include more area than the French do with theirs but whatever measure you use, Tokyo is a whopper with a population of about 38 million, compared to London’s 8.7 million and New York’s 8.5 million.   We took the subway in from the airport which lies off to the north east for a journey of about an hour and a half into somewhere near our hotel.  Part way in, the train stopped and we all had to get out because there had been ‘an incident’ which closed the line and was probably some poor devil under a train.  So we had to re-route ourselves using a map which looked for all the world as if it had been drawn by a demented spider on LSD with eight fistfuls of coloured pencils.  Photo enclosed.   Well obviously we got to the correct hotel eventually and this was a greater success than might have been predicted at Heathrow.  After waiting for a few minutes we realised that we were at the wrong stop for our hotel shuttle and missed the leave time by a couple of minutes.  Not to worry though, this was a British bus and was naturally ten minutes late.

The Tokyo subway map

According to The Book, Lonely Planet, Asakusa has an old Tokyo feel to it but of course we have nothing to compare it with.  It is definitely a really good spot to be located with lots of restaurants, shops, great transport links and an incredible Buddhist Temple complex,  Senso-Ji.  Lots of bright red, big bells, grimacing statues and impressively sweeping roof lines with a strong hint of incense.

As I mentioned, we’re in Japan for six weeks and could probably use it all up in Tokyo although we have no intention of doing so.  Our plan such as it is will include the northernmost big island of Hokkaido where the Winter Olympics have been held and the sea sometimes freezes in winter.  It’s probably far enough north to sometimes see the Northern Lights but if we do we’re hoping they’re not North Korean ones.  We’re hoping to see some autumn colour and some wildlife.   In the other direction, we’re hoping to get to the southernmost big island of Kyushu which is sub-tropical.  So, we’re in Tokyo for four nights and hope to get a good feel for the place, vast though it is but our ‘plan’ is always flexible enough to spend time back here at the end of our trip if we choose to.

We’ve just learned that there is a British style cake shop in Tokyo run by expat Brits which they’ve chosen to call Mornington Crescent.   This will mean absolutely nothing to a number of you but others will laugh and still more others will nod sagely because they understand the joke.

There will be a theme which will probably run through all these blogs and that’s what seem like oddities to us but of course are just a different culture’s way of behaving.  One of the biggest reasons to travel.  Things which we noticed immediately were that although we knew that driving was on the left as per Britain so is standing on an escalator whereas we stand on the right.  Litter appears to be virtually non-existent although we have seen groups of smartly dressed people with tongs picking some litter from flowerbeds.  So many shop doors are automatic, the ones that aren’t tend to have notices saying ‘Manually Operated Door’ and generally the doors slide open rather than swing.   As you would expect in a country noted for politeness, queuing is de rigeur.  At bus stops a neat queue of individuals will stand parallel to the kerb with their backs to the oncoming traffic.  There is no pushing and personally I consider the ability to queue properly one of the most notable marks of a civilised society.  Any fat lout can push an old lady out of the way but civilised behaviour is about taking other people into consideration.  On the subway, lines form at right angles to the platform where floor markings indicate precisely where the train will stop and when a train does so, the queue parts to let passengers get off.  Wonderful.   Bowing of course is universal but I’ll write about that in a later blog.

Senso-ji Temple

 

Senso-ji at night

Traditional dress with obligatory 'selfies'

On our first full day, still a bit dazed and glazed from jet lag, we set out into the bus and subway system.  I knew doing those ‘Master level’ Sudokus would come in handy somewhere.   Just exploring really but heading towards two areas called Ueno (large park, National Museum) and Yanesen (temples by the score, cemetery and older buildings).   Turned out to be a piece of cake, just like Andersen’s Bakery in Ueno’s main station which had some lovely bread and cakes although some of the baked items had clearly been adapted for a Japanese palate, Curry Doughnut anyone ?   Actually we’d bought yet another ‘pass’ for Tokyo transport which was like London’s Oyster card and it turned out to be very useful.   We arrived in Japan with two main line train passes which includes travel on the Shinkansen, known to us all as The Bullet Train, so now we have three passes each.

You would think that a park is a park is a park unless there were obvious design differences which there weren’t but to us this one was just so non-western, maybe it was the species growing or the pruning or subtle differences in layout.  Maybe it was that being so interested in plants we were more tuned in, as it were, but it definitely felt different.    In front of a large ornamental pond was a set of tents as part of a food festival and a stage with a group of young women wearing beautiful

kimonos, walking up and down in what looked like a choreographed display.  The incongruity was the single westerner amongst them who was about six inches taller than everyone else.  We saw our first Buddhist monks since we arrived, all shaven headed and wearing saffron coloured robes.  I believe they all take a vow of poverty and these days that’s clearly taken as meaning ‘including an Iphone’.   The National Museum was for another day and we headed into the area with the temples.  Lots of temples, tucked down every side street it seemed and many with graveyards.  Every grave had a sheaf of wooden boards standing vertically with inscriptions written on them.  Each board was about five feet high with rounded corners, 5 inches or so wide and a quarter of an inch thick.  They looked very much like giant ice-lolly sticks and clattered in a breeze.  This was the area in which we came across the workshop and gallery of Allan West, a softly spoken artist from Washington DC who lives in Japan and produces the most exquisite traditional artwork, mixing his paints from raw materials.  

Allan West at work

 The most spectacular were the large room divider screens at £35,000 or so a piece.  The posture he painted in looked agonising to us.  Whatever he was working on lay flat on the floor while he was on a rolling platform which was held several inches above the work and which he inched forwards as work progressed.  He sat with his legs to one side, leaning forwards and slightly sideways to paint below his own body level while supporting his upper body by an elbow on one knee.  He told us that he’d got used to it.

Graveyard with those memorial sticks