back to japan 4 - osaka

(or as I occasionally called it, Ocado!)

     This is the heart of a megalopolis of 19 million people, taking in Kyoto and about twenty other cities of the coastal plain, and it shows: huge retail and entertainment areas crammed with    people.     

    On our first night we were overwhelmed by the area known as Minami, where thousands of restaurants and bars cluster around a canal and the street Dontonburi. Huge electronic signboards blare out their wares, and waiters try to drag you into their competing establishments. The area where we stayed, Shinsaibashi, is scarcely less busy, a grid of narrow lanes. On this weekend, families were roaming the streets, apparently looking for something to do. Our very trendy hotel, all polished concrete and eco options, had great public areas, but minuscule rooms, seemingly built for crabs as you had to go sideways to get anywhere.

     To escape the madness we walked through some of the leafier quarters to the relatively wide open spaces around the castle. This is largely a reconstruction but still impressive – the largest in Japan – moats within moats formed of giant granite blocks, with the many tiered castle at its  centre.   

     We also caught a local train out to Minoo park, a calm and heavily wooded deep valley gouged out of the surrounding hills. Deep into the gorge, where we caught a glimpse of the local monkeys, is a waterfall, a favourite spot for local walkers. Definitely the highlight of our stay here.

     We took a chance one evening on a yakitori restaurant, which offered the chef's choice of assorted skewers. Most were delicious but one comprised barbecued chicken cartilage!

back to japan 3 - fukuoka

    

LEAVING the north behind we boarded a plane with about 200 school students, all in that formal midshipman's uniform, and obediently lining up in columns, boys to the left, girls to the right. At our destination they formed up in regimental lines, and the head boy stepped forward and delivered a report to the headmaster. A far cry from a British school party on tour. We had arrived in the southern city of Fukuoka, as our bag tags, displaying the first three letters, boldly proclaimed: an attractive city, with many waterways and parks.

     The best of them is Ohori, with its huge lake. We crossed the lake via a series of wooded islands, with many wild birds in evidence. There is a beautifully maintained Japanese traditional garden, a miniature landscape of rocks, watefalls and pines. Just by the park are the extensive ruins of the old Edo castle, vast walls within walls, but the castle itself was detroyed as a symbol of the brutal feudal regime, at the start of the Meiji era. The courtyards are full of cherry trees, and at the time of our visit, hundreds of giant eggs that are illuminated at night.

     Here's a very romantic, very Japanese approach to town planning: in the 1960s the local authority planned to cut down a line of cherry trees to widen the road beside the castle. The locals fixed a series of poems to the trees lamenting their loss. In response, the mayor wrote his own poem, regretting the decision – and the trees were kept and thrive to this day.

     We continued to the beach at Momochi, a bit disappointing as you have to go through an uninspiring business district to get there, and it is dominated by a fake Spanish wedding chapel. But it was nice to see the sea!

     We stayed in Hakata, once a separate city. Beside our hotel is the island of Nakasu, separated from the rest of the city by canals, and the focus of nightlife, from the sophisticated to the downright steamy. Along the canal there are also a series of food stalls (yatai), for which Fukuoka is famous, seating about 8 or 10 and offering mostly ramen and and hot pot dishes.

back to japan 2 - hokkaido

SO IT'S OFF to the snowy north. The shinkansen whisks us via a long tunnel to the island of Hokkaido. First stop Hakodate, once the main port linking the north to the main island of Honshu. It feels very much like an old American port town, down on its luck – vacant plots, attempts to turn it into a tourist destination on the lines of Cannery Row in California, some interesting old frontier style buildings, but mostly banal modern.

     This was the first port where outside trading contacts were allowed in the 1850s after many years of isolation. The Russians, Americans and British rapidly established commercial bases and consulates. Some of that history is still visible: Russian style architecture including an onion domed orthodox church, a classical house for the Japanese colonial Governor.

     There are huge brick warehouses, now providing an opportunity for Chinese duty free shopping, and a morning market selling a vast array of fish products including gigantic live king crabs.

     Next day we continued along the coast by the narrow gauge railway to Noborobetsu. This is a complete contrast, a spa town in a deep wooded valley, spoilt a little by large ugly hotels for tour groups. However, we stayed in a lovely ryokan (Kashotei Hanaya) – immaculate rooms, tatami mat floors, sliding screens, and its own homely onsen, where you bathe naked in the water from local hot springs. But living on the floor is hard for these old western bones.

The water comes at 80C and high pressure from further into the hills, an area known locally as Hell's valley, all fumaroles and steam and sulphorous smells. The contrast of the soft calm snow and the violent outpourings from the earth were stunning. In the town there's a geyser that boils angrily every three hours.

     Back at the hotel we were served an elaborate kaiseki dinner in our room – multiple courses, each with many elements of contrasting taste and textures, each served on carefully chosen crockery. I have come to realise that modern western chefs have taken all their cues from Japan. The bento breakfast was almost as good.

     So on to Sapporo. We made a short tour of Noborobetsu until our train arrived. The town features a weird 'European' theme park, and little else, although I manged a spectacular cartoon style fall on the ice – without much damage!

Sapporo was colder than the east coast and we tramped the streets despite persistent snow showers delivered on a keen wind. We saw preparations already udner way for the ice sculpture festival.

     The second day was a big improvement – bright and sunny. We went out east of the city and walked through the forest park to visit the Hokkaido building museum, which holds lots of fascinating mostly nineteenth century buildings brought from all over the island. In thick new snow and with few other visitors, it was spectacular. Nearby is the Hokkaido museum; its huge imposing modern building houses an interesting display on the geography and history of the island, emphssiisng that it is at the crossroads between north and south Asia. Prehistoric cultures came here during the ice age and continued as a separate ethnic group – the Ainu – more akin to Siberian peoples than to the mainland Japanese, who colonised and brutally 'assimilated' them during the shogun era. Eventually the island was incorporated into Japan in the late ninteenth century. It all felt disconcertingly like the history of Ireland.

     We returned to the hotel via the Sapporo beer museum – a bit of a tourist trap and the free samples were off limits on the day of our visit. The brewery is a series of interesting nineteenth century buildings (part of that colonisation!)

     We finished the day with tonkatsu comfort food and a few pints in an Irish pub.

back to japan 1 - tokyo

    

FLYING IN EARLY we hit the rush hour on the metro to Ginza and it seems very familiar: jammed in tight, silent, eyes locked on phones where space permits: but different too: uniformity of black suits and black hair create a monocultural image very different from our dear old lumbering Underground.

     Dumping our bags at the hotel, with six hours to kill we wander the streets of Ginza and find our way to the forecourt of the Imperial Palace. School trips all around. Here a party of white track suited kids run riot; while a boys' school in smart midshipman style uniforms stand stiffly as they listen to their teacher: the class system as strong here as back home. The eastern gardens of the palace are open to the public (though partly cut off as the remnants of the recent enthronement of the new emperor are dismantled). Built within the massive stone walls of the old Edo castle, they are a good introduction to the Japanese love of landscape gardening, miniature visions of wild nature.

     It's testimony to how much we loved our first visit to Japan that we are back so soon. We grab some lunch in a traditional tonkatsu restaurant embedded in a department store; luscious fried pork and giant prawn in breadcrumbs, with lots of accompaniments: the local comfort food.

     Next day, with weather much better than predicted, we visit Asakusa, a very grand palace built at the turn of the 20^th century in French Empire style for the crown prince, and now a government guest house, all enormous gilded halls and crystal chandeliers. From there we walked through the Aoyama district, with its huge cemetery: the granite grave markers stand stark in the winter sunlight, rhyming with the narrow square tower blocks of the city beyond. This brings us to the jewel-like Nezu museum, a light and airy modernist building, designed by Kenzo Kuma and completed in 2009 set in a steeply sloping strolling garden featuring those same eight views and a very modern tea house where we had lunch. The museum houses a collection of oriental statues and scroll paintings, the best of them inspirationally spare in technique – a few deft brush strokes and a whole bamboo plant appears. 

     This spareness is reflected in the building and in Japanese interiors generally, which of course has a huge influence on interior design around the world today, but here is in a tradition going way back to the simple timber houses and tatami rooms across the country. Our hotel room at the Millennium Mitsui also reflected this. A compact but perfectly formed room where every detail had been worked out, down to the smallest. (There was also a toilet that opened up and whined every time you went past, like an eager puppy that wants to play, and which had 12 buttons to operate and an A4 size list of instructions!)

     We continued to the National Garden at Shinjuku, Japan's Kew, another beautiful example of the tradition recently feautured in Monty Don's series on Japanese landscape design. By then we had had enough (walking over ten miles in the day) and finished the day with a siesta and a visit to the Belgian beer bar near the hotel that we had found the previous day. A late middle aged man sat at the bar with a plate of salad and three small glasses of different Belgian beers, which he porceed to sniff and sample like a wine connoisseur. Slowly, slowly, sip after sip, for a full two hours before the salad and the drinks were gone. Not a word to anyone: absolute focus on the task in hand. Then a quick phone call – to the wife saying he'd been held up to at the office? – and he was off.

     The third day was all drizzle and sleet, but we still managed some major walking starting at Ueno Park, where we visited the le Corbusier designed Museum of Western Art. This has a very comprehensive collection from the early Renaissance through to modernists. Then through the park to the Yanaka district: small streets and houses, many temples, and the main shopping street, Yanaka Ginza, where we had lunch in a local cafe. Then we hopped on the tram that runs through the northern suburbs to Shinjuku, people watching as the locals came and went, mostly on local journeys of a few stops. Old ladies bent double with shopping trolleys; Saturday dads with lively nippers that smiled shyly at us foreigners; track suited youths sharing an instagram video.

     An early morning vignette. A very old security guard, well into his seventies, in hi-vis uniform with a red baton (a common phenomenon here) stands outside the entrance to a car park. It's a job creation kind of job: he just waits until a car emerges from the garage and waves the baton around ineffectually to stop the traffic. A young girl, in a smart school uniform, probably no more than eight and on her own, approaches: a secret smile on her face as she sees the guard. She catches his eye and stops facing him. He smiles and bows very respectfully to her. She bows even more deeply, then is on her way. A little ritual that has perhaps developed over many weeks as she walks to school, a little moment to brighten the day for both of them.

japan - conclusions

So what will we remember about this whistlestop tour of Japan?  Admittedly we only skimmed the surface but we saw a lot in two sun-filled weeks, in which we travelled 1600 miles by train, over 100 miles on foot, and visited any number of shrines, castles and gardens, including parts of six world heritage sites.  Ian and I sat down and listed the things we will likely remember about this trip.

[there are more pictures via this link]

• the sheer number of biscuit shops
• boxy cars
• extreme politeness: the world's most orderly queues, no talking in cinemas (and no leaving until the very end of the credits)
• the vast city stations
• the fantastic shinkansen - spacious, smooth, comfortable and on time - and easy reservation system
• signs, signs, signs, on every surface - but making it very easy to get around
• complete lack of planning controls
• the narrow backstreets full of electric wires and tiny businesses and houses
• great food (Isetan food hall makes Harrods' look like a 7-11)
• bento boxes
• sushi made before your eyes
• good pillows, good baths, bizarre toilets
• the onsen and lobby (with 3 hour free drinks) at the Hyatt Regency, Hakone
• elaborate wrapping of everything you buy
• people doing jobs with no apparent function
• cleanliness (street sweepers actually scrubbing the road)
• small businesses that don't seem to make economic sense (restaurants and bars that seat 10 people)

kyoto

      So from the farthest point on our trip we retraced our route as far as Kyoto. The station features a vast concourse matching Grand Central or Milan in scale, a futurist edifice designed by Hiroshi Mara and opened in 1997 with a 15 storey high barrel vault, and escalators going up and up to the sky. Like most of these Japanese rail hubs, the building incorporates a department store, shopping mall, restuarants and much more. We stayed in the 500 room Granvia Hotel there (we also stayed in station hotels in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, much the best way as these are also subway/tram/bus hubs so easy on arrival and for getting around the city). The hotel has all the self-confidcne and busy-ness of the best city hotels, with bellhops buzzing around, endless bowing functionaries (although their only function seemed to be bowing) and visitors from around the world coming and going.

     Kyoto was a city that grew on us over the days we spent there. There are wide boulevards but also a grid of narrow lanes, full of overhead wires and tiny businesses, and even tinier houses, all individual in design (you never see a terrace of identical units) and crammed in cheek by jowl, often with another house built on the land behind and accessed by a tiny passage. You could call it ugly, but it felt lived-in and even cute. The tiny houses mostly have a tiny car space with a tiny boxy car. These almost cartoonish vehicles are unique to Japan and very popular. The Nissan N-box is the country's best selling car. To the east of the city, particularly the Gion district, the houses are older, traditional timber stuctures. We wandered around after dark and although it's now rather touristy, its narrow dimly lit lanes, busy, gleaming Shinto shrines, and Japanese visitors in hired kimonos made gave a flavour of old Kyoto.

     As the former capital, until the 1860s, Kyoto has plenty of historic sites and we visited some of the most famous. The Higashi (eastern) Hongan-ji temple of a Buddhist sect is one of the world's biggest timber buildings and really is on a massive scale, with a calm, hushed interior that contrasts to the hubbub of Shinto shrines. The Imperial palace gardens are also huge, with wide gravel walkways, friendly herons and the forbidding walls of the palace itself. It contrasts with Nijo-jo, the double moated castle of the Shoguns. Here we visited the lavish audience chambers, splendid but fragile, all wood and paper sliding screens with wonderful wall paintings of tigers and wild landscapes; and numbing to our bare feet on this brilliantly sunny but chilly day.

     Further afield we visited the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine – at the foot of the mountain, it features thousands of torii gates framing the paths up the hillside and through bamboo forests. We were also lucky enough to visit the Katsura imperial villa, a modest retreat designed for moon-viewing, with elaborate gardens and tea houses for each season.

     Finally, we went to the railway museum. Although not train buffs we found this fascinating. Early steam trains through to the first shinkansen are on display, and it has what must be the world's biggest model train set.

hiroshima and nagasaki

    

Now a prosperous modern city resting on the ashes of the fallen, Hiroshima carefully reminds us of the horrors of war, and stands as a champion for peace. The memorial museum lets the personal testimonies of survivors stand for themselves when describing the sudden erasure of an entire civilian population one sunny August day in 1945. The familiar shell of the 'A-bomb building' stands as a gaunt reminder. The museum at Nagasaki is perhaps even more impressive. It stands on a rise overlooking the bomb's ground zero. We are told that no-one survived within 1 km of this spot, and there are stories of the creeping radiation sickness that followed, spreading wider and wider each day. Some even more harrowing stories are told here.

     Hiroshima has since rebuilt and is now a prosperous city, established 500 years ago in a river delta as a defensive stronghold. The branches of the river, now concreted in place, provide an attractive relief from the urban sprawl. There is a shogun's castle (a reconstruction of the buildings destroyed in 1945) with massive defences and a five storey wooden keep. We preferred Nagasaki, set on either side of a steep sided valley, with mountains visible beyond. In the days of isolationist Japan, this was the only place that Europeans were allowed to stay. A small artificial island was a trading base for the Portuguese – until they were thrown out for attempting to convert the locals to Christianity – and then the Dutch. The site has now been reconstructed to show the strange mix of Japanese and western design that resulted. 

    By the mid 19^th century the Americans and British arrived and pretty soon Japan was open to free trade and an industrial revolution. Nagasaki became the first centre of shipbuilding and manufacturing. The houses of Dutch and British merchant colonies are preserved on hillsides above the port, deveoped as Japan opened up to free trade. The view from the Glover House is said to have inspired Puccini's Madame Butterfly.     
     There were some extraordinary chancers who fetched up here and made a fortune at the start of Japan's opening up. What's curious is how quickly Japan's psyche moved from complete isolation to wanting to control half of Asia.

    

     There was also a Chinese community here, with its own isolated walled compound, and the temples, streets and restaurants in this part of the city still have a Chinese flavour. Lots of scurrying about with loaded hand trolleys, and mysterious shops selling very little. Preparations were being made for the elaborate annual lantern festival. We did the other big tourist thing here, a trip by cable car (Ian managed to brave it) to a high western lookout with an eagle's eye view of the entire city.

     The last part of the rail journey to get to Nagasaki was spectacular. We transferred from a shinkansen to a limited express train. The route has to fight its way through difficult terrain, with dozens of tunnels and sharp bends, and viaducts across sea facing gorges, to the terminus at the far south eastern end of Japan's main islands.

     Close to Hiroshima is the island known as Miyajima, one of Japan's most famous shrines. We took the tram and ferry there. This is a very old sacred location, dedicated to the sea-god patrons of a local war lord. Though rebuilt many times, the form is supposed to be as it was in the 12^th century – a series of walkways and inner shrines over water, with a huge torii gate indicating the entrance, out to sea – one of Japan's most celebrated views.