春の旅 Part 1: Pre-Tokyo

Ray came to visit, and using the Seishun Ju Hachi Kippu (a five day local train pass) we slowly wound our way East from Osaka to Tokyo. Our trip can pretty much be summed up with this one picture:

OSAKA
I had to work Tue so Ray wandered round Umeda during the day. I came and met him after school was over, and we took the underground to Shinsaibashi, where we wandered round Amemura, before heading down to Namba and Dotonbori area to explore the area and give him a taste of Okonomiyaki, Osaka's trademark dish. After a bit of trip planning over a beer, retired pretty early to our capsule to get an early start towards Kyoto next day. (Capsule had awesome baths, bathtime is the best thing about them. Fell asleep to Super Chample (see couple of posts back) in the capsule as well.)


KYOTO
Wednesday morning, went and had a look round the wonderful station, introduced Ray to another important aspect of Japanese culture, Mr Donuts (I wonder if I'm really the right person to introduce Japan...) before jumping on the train two stops to Inari to see Fushimi Inari, the famous shrine with the seemingly never ending red torii gates that create a pretty magical atmosphere. They have a whole fox theme going on, with statues of foxes tucked in every nook and cranny along the way. We went... quite a long way I guess, but there was more to do so we didn't get to the end. More to see! Headed back to the station for a brief walk round the area (see the McDonalds slightly brown sign? It's supposed to be less gaudy than normal, cos this is Kyoto, and they 'dont go in for that sort of thing' around here... supposedly.)





HIKONE
Made a quick stop here to walk around the castle area (didn't go inside as it looked like it would take the best part of a day to explore), saw the cherry blossoms, and introduced Ray to further important aspects of Japanese culture: see through umbrellas, chu hais, and takoyaki.


On to Nagoya! Some beatiful views along the way. The trains were really crowded in general, we rarely got to sit down (at least on this leg of the journey.) The special all-you-can-ride ticket can only be used during the spring holiday, so loads of people with kids or older people had the same idea as us. Makes me wonder how unbelievably crowded Golden Week will be though (when EVERYBODY in the country has most of the week off.)



NAGOYA
Nagoya has a really good feeling to it. Really good looking city and it's own identity away from the others. Ray and I both really liked it.



First we went to Sakae to the Robot museum where after riding around on Segways (fun but were the safety helmets really neccesary?) we watched museum staff wearing lab coats make three Sony Aibos in Kimonos (??) dance. This was a bit weird. (Can you imagine the meeting? "Yeah, so for our next serious robot demonstration, how about some robot dogs dancing together to hungarian folk music?" "Taro, I love it, but it's lacking something." "I know! Let's dress them in little robot dog kimonos!")



They had a really cool timeline of of bits and bobs from robots in popular culture, astro boy, kraftwerk, R2-D2, Dr Slump, Speak and Spell, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, various anime... was cool to see it all presented so seriously. Downstairs is a shop with cool robot-y products for your house (and robot shaped omiyage sweets.) There was a room where you could play with various robots, and the girl who worked with the Aibos had named them all, and they are pretty cool. Some even speak in Kansai-ben! You can tell them 'take a picture' in Japanese and then they look at you (there's a camera in their nose) and then you say 'Cheezu!' and it snaps and saves to its memory stick.




Ate some Misokatsu (pork cutlet in heavy miso sauce) and Tabasaki (spicy chicken wings), Nagoya famous foods (the restaurant was playing the new Musiq album) and went round Sakae. They have a Fortnum and Mason's there! Shock. Theres a large TV tower (which has a figure of spiderman climing it at the moment) and they were beaming a thin green light onto it from further down in the street in a sort of a calling batman style. Theres a really interesting place... you can't really call it a building, more of a construction, called Oasis 21. Underground are a number of shops and cafes, overground is an area with grass and cool walkways, and the thing itself is a large oval... platform i guess? But that doesn't do it justice. It's Great.



On the way back to our capsule, in the freeeeezing cold dead of night air, a group of young guys were playing jazz in the pedestrian area in the central intersection of Sakae. They were reeeallly good! Played Straight No Chaser, Feel Like Making Love, Chameleon, September, Pick Up the Pieces and St Thomas - before I got so cold I had to call it a night as a listener, I have no idea how they managed to play in the biting night air. Unfortunately their only supporters seemed to be one of their friends, one of their girlfriends, a guy who stopped on his bike, and me and Ray and a bunch of people who seemed to be enjoyed it as they passed, but the freezing temperature moved them on. Shame. Talked to them briefly between tunes, they were Uni students in Nagoya studying on the Jazz course having a little midnight jam session. So cool! Little things like that add so much.



The capsule here was a good one, in the bathing area had like a fake waterfall over a large rock wall with little hollowed out bits in caves with jet streams and stuff. Watching TV in a capsule is loads more fun than it should be, don't know why. I guess because you turn up at a time when strange things are on. There was an interview with Fidel Castro (who was pretty animated), an old 70s anime and of course Super Chample! Excellent. Next morning, the capsule hotel was playing a lounge version of Killing Me Softly as we left - bonus.

Next morning, went up Oasis 21 (we had been too late to actually go up it the previous night). It's got a shallow pool of water in the middle that really adds to it looks, especially from underneath. Popped into a couple of shops downstairs (all the Ghibli and Jump Comics goods you could need - important Japanese culture to show Ray? Maybe getting there.) Rode the subway back to the main JR station (see the massive towers) then on to Hamamatsu.



HAMAMATSU
Still trying to introduce Japanese culture, I took Ray to Freshness Burger...
Hamamatsu has a nice feel to it... can't put my finger on it, but it's something to do with the fact that it's not huuuge and a lot of the buildings seem to be a little bit older than say Nagoya... Like a fun city, almost stuck in a little timewarp from the 80s or something? To be fair, wasn't there anything near like the amount of time you need to get an accurate impression, but that was my quick first impression of the place. It's called 'the city of music' as lots of music companies are based here, and 100% of Japanese pianos are made here. Some of the stations signs are in Portugese as well, owing to the high Brazilian population.




They have a wonderful museum here - Museum of Musical Instruments! I could spend all day here. Grouped by continent, they have fantastic examples of instruments from all over the world - you can't play most of them, but not a single one is inside a cabinet, so you can see them all up close. In front of each one is a set of headphones playing the music of the instrument, so you can hear everything. I fell in love with the sound of the Shakuhachi (bamboo flute), which I recognised the name of from the default 127 GM sounds of most keyboards, but the real thing is beautiful. The instruments that I knew, the examples there were all such great quality (see the range they have just for maracas in the pic below) that you could trust the ones you didnt were also great. Of course they had steel pans!! And there was a trying stuff out room (which became the playing-the-godfather-theme-on-as-many-instruments-as-you-can room) which had cute mini little pans. A room full of classic early pianos and stuff... wow. I LOVED this place.


Headed up ACT tower (the second pic in the Hamamtasu section) which is supposed to look like a mouth organ, again, with the city of music theme. The views were amaaazing. Slightly different from those of Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo which was to come in that they were of a smaller city and so you felt the view was more revealing than the others. I found it absolutely amazing, like a city made from the musical narrative of Naoya Matsuoka's Pacific Jam album or something. Still, no time to ponder on this trip, we headed off to Shizuoka.


SHIZUOKA
We had kind of been neglecting cool shopping districts, but Shizuoka sorted that. Tiny little backstreets with UNDFTD, Neighbourhood and Bape right across from each other and small independent places tucked along the roads.


We saw a massive torii gate and went to investigate. Turned out to be a seemingly endless road leading down to a shrine, and they had had a festival that day that was almost completely wound up apart from the street sellers along the way. I counted over 50 (!) of them, selling tacoyaki (octopus balls), okonomiyaki, chocobanana, karaage (fried chicken), yakitori (grilled meat on skewers), toffee strawberries (think toffee apples), and character shaped dorayaki. That was dinner sorted then, and we wandered round the shrine grounds in the fading light. We decided to go to Tokyo a little earlier than we'd originally planned and headed off.



To Tokyo --> Part 2 Soon Come