Love The Shinkansen

It is rare that I devote an entire post on this blog to practical travel advice. In fact I think I've only done it once before when I returned from my 2014 trip to England. But in researching and then actually traveling around Japan, we found something that saved us a ton of money. So here's a post dedicated to the Japan Rail Pass. If you are headed to Japan, I'd look into this. It could save you a ton of cash.

Now, I've looked into these sorts of things before, specifically in continental Europe. The various train systems in western Europe participate in what's called a Eurail Pass, a multi-day pass that allows you hop from train to train around Germany, France, Italy and the like all for a single lump sum which varies depending on the duration of the pass you elect to buy. The pass is only available to non-European residents and you have to purchase it before you get there. I've checked this deal out more than once and each time have come to the conclusion that you pretty much have to be traveling long distances on trains every day to make it work out. I've always passed.

The Japan Rail Pass works similarly to the Eurail Pass. You pay a flat fee for either a 7 day, 14 day or 21 day pass and then are able to ride almost any train in the Japan Rail system as much as you want during the period the pass is active. The pass is not available to residents of Japan (just like the Eurail Pass) and you have traditionally been required to purchase the pass before arriving in Japan (although for a limited time you are permitted to purchase the pass in country, albeit at a higher fee). The Japan Rail Pass is similar to the Eurail Pass in most every respect except one: it's a better value.

Japan's iconic shinkansen, or bullet train.

Let's look at the economics using my recent trip as a guide. A 7 day Japan Rail pass retails for 29,110 Yen as of May 2017. That's a little more than $250 as of the summer of 2017. That appears to be a lot, but not if you run the numbers. We knew we were spending time in Tokyo before heading over to Kyoto for a few days then onto Miyajima via Hiroshima before returning to Tokyo. We also knew we wanted to take a day trip to Nara from Kyoto. Japan Rail covers all of these cities. That's a lot of train travel; we figured we'd be spending a lot on rail travel anyway.

A train ticket on the bullet train, or shinkansen, from Tokyo to Kyoto is 13,600 Yen each way. Yes, the Japan Rail Pass works on the shinkansen and that's a round trip cost of 27,200 Yen, which is almost the same as a 7 day Japan Rail Pass. Add in a round trip from Kyoto to Hiroshima at 11,090 Yen each way and we covered the cost of a 7 day pass easily with a savings of 20,270 Yen.

Pile on a round trip to Nara at 710 Yen each way; a round trip from Hiroshima to the mainland Miyajima ferry terminal at 410 Yen each way; and a round trip on the JR Ferry to Miyajima at 360 Yen round trip and my savings were up to 22,870 Yen which is about $200. You can also use the Japan Rail Pass on the JR trains around Tokyo and Kyoto and on the tourist bus that hits the high points in Hiroshima. We used all three and saved a bunch more Yen on I don't know how many train and bus rides. The savings just keep piling up.

One of the Japan Rail lines which you can use to get just about anywhere in Tokyo.

So I know what you are thinking. There's some fine print, right? Well, yes. Or no. Not really fine print. But there are what I'll call some stickier points you need to be aware of.

The first is the "buy ahead" rule that I've mostly discussed already. When you make the decision that the Japan Rail Pass is for you, you need to find someone who sells them because Japan Rail (which is a national company subdivided into six separate geographies) doesn't. Fortunately, there is a list of agents available through a link on their website. For those in North America, you can get to the list of your local agents by using the clickable link in the prior sentence.

What you will purchase through the agent isn't the actual Japan Rail Pass. You need to swap the coupon that you purchase at a designated exchange office. Fortunately, the Japan Rail Pass site also has a link to a list of locations when you can get the actual document. Allow some time for this and make sure your passport has a visitor's visa stamp or sticker. Without it, you cannot exchange the coupon you bought for the actual pass.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that you can take the shinkansen using your Japan Rail Pass and that's true. However, you can't take all the shinkansens using your Pass. There are a number of different types of shinkansen in Japan. The fastest are the Nozomi and Mizuho shinkansen. These you cannot take using the Japan Rail Pass. You'll most likely have to settle for a Hikari shinkansen, meaning instead of traveling at 170 miles per hour, you'll have to make do at a speed 30 miles per hour slower. I think you might be able to handle that if it means saving a couple of hundred dollars, right?

Waiting for the JR Ferry to Miyajima Island, which is included as part of the Japan Rail Pass.

A few final thoughts on this deal.

Google Maps is an incredibly useful app to get from point A to point B, even overseas. I use it a lot here at home to drive places I've never been before. You can also use it to figure out train and bus schedules. Only, it doesn't work that well for trains in Japan because it only shows you the fastest way to get to your destination. For a shinkansen ride, that means it shows you only route and time information for the Nozomi, which you can't use using your Japan Rail Pass. Seek alternate ways of figuring out how long rail journeys will take.

There is a train from Tokyo's Narita Airport to downtown Tokyo called the Narita Express. It costs 4,560 Yen for a roundtrip ticket. The Japan Rail Pass will get you on this train. If your 7 day or 14 day window includes your arrival day or departure day, use the Japan Rail Pass to get to or from the airport. There is a coupon exchange location in the airport. Remember to redeem the coupon for a Pass once you clear customs and immigration.

Finally, this pass offered us a ton of flexibility. If you want to reserve a seat on a train, you can; just take the pass to a ticket desk and get a seat. You can also just walk onto a non-reserved car if you can figure out the schedule on your own. On our return trip from Hiroshima to Tokyo, we knew there was a transfer required somewhere but didn't know where exactly so we made sure to check with the ticket desk and get some seats. 

We ended up with our first train being 62 minutes later but I figured trains probably ran every hour and if we hustled we could make the one two minutes from the time we were handed our ticket. I was right and we really hustled. The Japan Rail Pass allowed us to sit down in an unreserved car and shed an hour off our trip back to Tokyo. Couldn't have made that on the spot decision without the Pass.

If you are moving around in Japan and planning to take trains to do so, I'd look into a Japan Rail Pass. It may be the best $250 or so you'll spend.

Myth Of Tomorrow

At 2:40 a.m. on August 6, 1945, three United States Army Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from the North Field airstrip on tiny Tinian Island, one of the Mariana Islands in the western north Pacific Ocean. The three planes, named Necessary Evil, The Great Artiste and Enola Gay, were bound for Japan, which at that time had been at war with the United States ever since the Japanese bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. 

It was not the first time aircraft had left Tinian Island in 1945 flying towards Japan. The U.S. Army had conducted surveillances and practice bombing runs toward the Japanese mainland earlier that same year. These flights were different. The Enola Gay was carrying a special cargo, a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy. It was one of the world's first atomic bombs and the plan that day was to drop it and detonate it, not against just a military target but on a city going about ordinary life (such as it was in wartime) filled with civilians including women and children.

The target that morning was Hiroshima, a city established in 1589 by the feudal warlord Mori Terumoto at a time when the entire nation of Japan was engulfed in a civil war. Terumoto built a castle in the city to serve as his personal stronghold but didn't hold it, or Hiroshima, very long, having it stripped from him for backing the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara in the year 1600. Over the subsequent almost three and half centuries, Hiroshima had grown into a city of 350,000 people and transformed itself during the industrial revolution in the late 1800s and early 20th century into one of Japan's most important manufacturing cities.

At 8:15 a.m. that morning of August 6, Little Boy exploded at 1,900 feet above the center of Hiroshima. What had taken the Japanese centuries to build was almost utterly destroyed in seconds. Wiped out at the same time as most of the city were an estimated 70,000 people, most of them civilians. And there would be a lot more death to follow. For better or worse, the United States had just ushered in the age of the atomic bomb.

The Atomic Bomb Dome viewed from the southeast, which is generally the direction of the blast. 

I feel one of the most powerful benefits of travel is that it sometimes causes us to challenge how we see the world and its history. Before I visited Hiroshima this past May I had my own opinions about what happened between the United States and Japan towards the end of World War II. Those opinions included my own made up justification for the country that I call home dropping the most powerful bomb ever developed to eradicate a city with less military value than other equally accessible targets.

I use the term "made up" here not to suggest that my impression of what happened was necessarily wrong, but simply that it was based on few facts and a lot of supposition. I feel I know more now. And that day I spent in Hiroshima two months ago for sure caused me to challenge my version of the truth that I had developed. I may still not have it right but I know my new version is based on more information than my past one.

Step off the train at Hiroshima Station today and you'll find a city that looks a lot like all the other Japanese cities that I passed through on my way from Tokyo to get there. Lots of concrete buildings, neat and orderly streets filled with people going about their days and FamilyMarts and 7-11s on just about every corner. I expected this. I also expected that soon after dropping my luggage off at the station's storage lockers I would find some kind of history that was quite different than a typical Japanese city. I was lucky enough to find one of the meipuru-pu buses that take you around the city right when I got out of the station. I hopped on for free with my Japan Rail Pass.

My destination that day was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on the north tip of the island between the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers, a spot maybe a few hundred feet west of the epicenter of the explosion back in August of 1945. The Park is a gathering spot for a number of different memorials and monuments with the overall theme of remembrance and hope that this sort of event never occurs again.

The memorials and monuments vary in type and scale. There is a Peace Bell which you can ring with the hope that we never forget what happened at Hiroshima. There's a pretty grisly burial mound with the remains of some of the victims in addition to a cenotaph honoring all the victims of that day and the aftermath. There's a children's memorial and a memorial honoring the Koreans who were only victims of the bomb because the Japanese had invaded Korea and conscripted them into service.

The main organizing element of the Park is a linear pool of water running north-south that links the saddle-shaped cenotaph (shown above) to a Flame of Peace. Look through the underside of the saddle and beyond the flame and you'll see what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which serves as an emblem of the type of destruction wrought upon a typical concrete and steel building by the explosion. It is the only building destroyed that day left in a state of ruin as a reminder of what the bomb did.

There's some powerful stuff in the Park, but honestly it is difficult to understand exactly what happened on August 6, 1945 from walking around the city. The words on the plaques and the various memorials all provide a ton of useful narrative both about the consequences of atomic bombs and the need to prevent these kinds of attacks. Even the burial mound failed to adequately convey to me exactly what had happened. And I don't think it's just a lack of imagination on my part or a lack of ability to empathize.

I've visited other sites where people have inflicted inhumane sorts of punishment on their fellow man since I've been writing this blog. I'm thinking primarily of the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich, Germany and the Civil War prisoner of war Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. In each of those places, the suffering was personal, meaning it was handed out and witnessed man to man under the supervision of other men, and the remembrances of what had happened were tangible, either through a reconstruction or the actual buildings there at the time. It's not difficult to feel overwhelmed with grief and horror when you are standing in a gas chamber designed to kill people, even if it was never used.

At Hiroshima, you can't get the same kind of experience by visiting memorials. The killing that occurred there was impersonal. The men that did the killing simply dropped a bomb out of an airplane. They never saw their victims. They never understood the kinds of lives they were wiping out and how much people suffered. And there were no discreet sites where the killing happened. It occurred everywhere all at once in a flash. That doesn't make it less regrettable, just less tangible.

Not even the Atomic Bomb dome gets you the same kind of experience. Its presence there almost makes it seem like that building was one of hundreds or thousands left in that state and that during reconstruction its neighbors were either re-built or completely demolished. That's not the case at all; most of the structures in the city in 1945 were not made of concrete and steel but instead of wood and paper and those were annihilated instantly. It's just difficult to understand how completely destroyed everything and everyone was from the Peace Memorial Park today.

Head west to Hiroshima from Tokyo and you may pass by the mural Myth of Tomorrow in Shibuya Station.

But make no mistake, something horrific happened here. After the initial blast killed the first 70,000 people, the survivors were the first in our history to come face to face with the reality of the aftereffects of an atomic bomb. And those realities are terrifying and must have been unbearably painful. There were of course people horribly burned as a result of the fire and heat that was unleashed by the blast. But there were other symptoms that seemed unrelated to the burns: vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, wounds as small as needle pricks that wouldn't heal, bleeding from the mouth and ears.

A lot of the remedies tried to combat these symptoms didn't work because the doctors administering the sick had never dealt with patients experiencing deterioration and death through radiation poisoning. If someone was exposed to it during the bomb blast they were suffering badly. If they drank the poisoned water in the city after the black rain fell, it was even worse. I can't imagine how confusing, distressing and horrific the days were after that bomb was dropped.

While you can't understand much of this from walking around the Peace Memorial Park, there are places in Hiroshima where you can get this perspective. If you are looking to understand what happened in that city in August of 1945, I would suggest you seek them out. You won't think about this event the same way when you do.

Head to the south end of the Peace Park and you'll find the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It features exhibits and historical timelines in a sequence on two floors of the building. There's an especially effective "bomb's-eye" view animation sequence that takes you through the devastation behind the initial blast right at the entrance to the exhibit which sets you up well for what's to come. More interesting to me was the narrative embedded in the historical timeline, because it helped change my impression of why the United States actually dropped the bomb in the first place.

Ringing the Peace Bell in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park.

It seems to me after visiting the Museum and watching documentaries and reading accounts since I returned from Japan that by the time August of 1945 rolled around the Japanese had little chance of winning their part of World War II. They were being defeated in battle all over the Pacific rim, support for the war was waning at home and the war in Europe had ended which would allow the United States and the Soviet Union to concentrate all their attention on the defeat of the Japanese. And herein seems to lie the crux of the issue surrounding the dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima and a little later a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.

World War II significantly shifted the balance of military power in the world out of western Europe and into the United States and the Soviet Union. The theory advanced in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is that the U.S. dropped the bombs that ended the war on Japan for two reasons: (1) to justify the cost of the research and development of the technology and (2) to send a message to the Russians, who at the time were fighting the Japanese in Manchuria on their way to potentially capturing a cold weather Pacific port that some feared the Soviets would never relinquish.

I can see the economic justification. As disgusting as the concept is, I can imagine politicians struggling to answer why we spent so much on developing a weapon that was never used. But I can also see the perceived need to back the Russians off and quickly. If the Soviet army fought their way through to the Chinese coast, word was they intended to invade Japan and end the war. And I can see that situation, particularly trying to get them out of Japan, being intolerable to the U.S. 

Standing in the Peace Memorial Museum after having walked through a good part of the city that was destroyed, I cannot see how dropping the bomb on that city caused the end of the war. It may have accelerated it and got it done to hinder the Soviets' plans, but I believe the surrender of Japan was inevitable and it seems to me the annihilation of Hiroshima was unnecessary. And I get that it's easy for me to say that in 2017 without understanding what the butterfly effect of not dropping the bomb would have been. But try arguing with me after you have been to the city that the first bomb destroyed.

A small portion of the devastation cause by the bomb, seen in the National Peace Memorial Hall. 

If the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall covers the essential history, then the place to understand the destruction wrought on the city and its people is the National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, which is located just a bit north of the Museum near the Cenotaph.

The building and its exhibits are focused on the people who died in the initial bomb blast and the days, months and years following. People who could have been just like you and me at one time, just going through a war not mandated by the people but by the military leaders who saw Japan's continued existence dependent upon foreign expansion to seize necessary raw materials. The National Peace Memorial Hall is a simple building, just basically a single ramp curving around and down to a circular Hall of Remembrance. The ramp contains stopping points with narratives and exhibitions describing the events leading up to August 6. But the payoff is down below in the Hall of Remembrance.

If there's a spot in Hiroshima where dropping the bomb and destroying a city hit home for me with all the weight that comes with that event, it was in the Hall of Remembrance. The walls of the Hall are a 360 degree photographic depiction of the condition of the city after the dropping of the bomb as taken by United States Army photographers once on the ground. There's almost nothing there. Almost everything is destroyed and in pieces on the ground.

Sure, there are a few buildings, including the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, still partially standing. These structures were likely built in the early 20th century to withstand Japan's earthquakes and they lasted through the blast to some degree. But anything else with any surface area is gone and reduced to a thin layer of rubble on the ground, the rest incinerated on the spot. There are some tree trunks and metal skeletons of radio towers and sadly enough one Shinto torii still upright but all the leaves and small branches on the trees are stripped, having too much mass to withstand the pressure of the blast. 

The effect of these photographs showing a former city as an almost completely denuded landscape on me was shocking. I couldn't have imagined I would have felt quite this way in Hiroshima. I expected to be sad and remorseful and respectful. I didn't imagine I'd see something that would have affected me the way that photographic mural did. When I think back to my time in the Hall, I think about how I would feel if it were my town that was laid to waste that way. I don't want that to happen ever again anywhere.

Before you get too upset with me for second guessing the United States government making extreme choices to end a war started by a country that over the years before the bomb was dropped committed horrific crimes against humanity, let me say a couple of things. First, to their credit, the Japanese are genuinely apologetic about and acknowledging of the fact that they started the war. They also appear to be genuinely ashamed of their former leaders and committed to never allowing this same sort of thing to happen again. Terms such as "mistaken national policy" in the exhibit narratives are real expressions of regret for me. I've been other places where the aggressors of war are not conciliatory; that's not a concern in Hiroshima.

Secondly, let me say I have no idea what the world would be like if the United States hadn't dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe there would have been a future war where nations would have already exchanged volleys of nuclear weapons because they wouldn't have seen what these things actually do to people and nations. It's really difficult to second guess history, especially when the result of horrific actions means the end of wars. I'd just encourage anyone before you get too entrenched in your position that dropping an atomic bomb was right to visit the place where it was dropped before getting too argumentative about your position.

Detail of Myth of Tomorrow, showing a skeleton burning from the heat of the blast.

If your trip to Hiroshima takes you through Tokyo, whether before or after, I think it's worth seeking out the mural in Tokyo's Shibuya Station called Myth of Tomorrow. The work is a large scale painting by the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto inspired by what happened both at Hiroshima and later at Nagasaki. It is considered by many people to be the Japanese Guernica, depicting the height of the horrors of war in Japan just like Pablo Picasso depicted the height of the horrors of war in Spain through what the Franco regime did to the city of Guernica.

The mural has a long and complicated history, including being lost for 30 years in Mexico, but is now on display in a public train station for all passing through and by to see. It's worth at least a few moments to stop and look if you are passing through the station. I found it before visiting Hiroshima. Now that I've been to the city, it seems more horrible and brutal and I suppose that's sort of the point. I love visiting places that reinforce my experiences when I travel; I feel the Myth of Tomorrow did that for me. Looking back at the pictures I took of that work reinforces the regret that I feel for what happened in Hiroshima.

The initial blast from Little Boy killed an estimated 70,000 people. By the end of 1945, just five short months later, there were an additional 70,000 dead from the aftereffects. I am proud of the efforts both my birth country of England and my home country of the United States made to fight in and end World War II in both Europe and the Pacific. Visiting Hiroshima for sure challenges that pride. It is difficult to justify wiping out an entire city and almost half its inhabitants when you are standing in the place where it happened. Hiroshima may not be everyone's preferred destination when traveling in Japan but I thought it was important to go here and draw my own conclusions about what happened on the ground. I think it's essential we see complicated issues like wars from the other side. Hiroshima allowed me a little glimpse through a different point of view. I'm sure I don't understand it completely but I'm sure I understand more now.

The Atomic Bomb Dome: Before and after.

Pac-Man Fever

In the beginning, there was Space Invaders. I don't know for sure if Space Invaders was the first arcade video game I ever played but I can't remember playing any other game before it so for the purposes of this blog post, it was the first. Maybe it was at a pizza parlor or a bowling alley (duckpin bowling, of course) or in the back of a drug store. Somehow, somewhere I started playing video games by dropping 25 cents at a time into Space Invaders machines.

I was lousy at it. I never could get used to using buttons to control the direction of my ship. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get beyond those buttons. But because there was pretty much no other video game worth playing, I continued to play Space Invaders whenever I had a spare quarter or two. Until something better came along.

Then in either 1980 or 1981, my parents took me and my sister on a trip to Orlando. We hit the Magic Kingdom, Kennedy Space Center and some more off the beaten track attractions like Gatorland Zoo. But one of the big highlights for me on that trip was the arcade at our hotel. I'm not talking one machine here, I mean a whole room full of video games and pinball machines. And in the midst of all those wonderful lights and sounds stood a single Pac-Man machine. My world would never be the same again. Sure I played more than just Pac-Man on that trip, but that was the game that hooked me.

Super Potato: El Dorado or mirage?

Pac-Man was the first video game that I loved. It was simple enough to do relatively well at but difficult enough that if you really got on a roll and cleared six or seven screens you felt euphoric (this was before I learned the game had patterns that could be deciphered and beaten relatively easily) and probably got to enter your initials on the machine when you got a new high score. Above all it had a joystick, not buttons. In the couple of years after that Florida trip, I spent a lot of time playing video games at arcades and I always went for the games with joysticks. Pac-Man. Crazy Climber. Rally X. Donkey Kong. Frogger. Dig Dug. Ms. Pac-Man. Mario Brothers.

Little did I know at the time, but all those games I loved were products of Japan. Taito. Namco. Nichibutsu. Nintendo. Konomi. It's been a long time since I've played any of these games although I admit to sneaking a peak on ebay every so often to see if there's a Crazy Climber or Frogger machine for cheap to be had (if only I had somewhere to put one...) but I thought maybe one of the districts of Tokyo might be crazy enough for me to find one of those machines and re-live a bit of my childhood years.

If this seems like a crazy notion, it's not. While video game arcades in the United States have gone the way of Pac-Man running into Blinky, not so much in Japan. There are Sega and Taito video game arcades all over Tokyo alongside restaurants and shops and 7-11 after 7-11 after 7-11. I thought why not try to find some classic video games to scratch a 35 year old itch while I was in country.

Yes, I get that 3330 is a pathetic score at Galaga but it wasn't all my fault.

Turns out I was in luck. While there was nothing doing for me at Taito or Sega, there's a spot down a side street in Tokyo's Akihabara district called Super Potato which allegedly had what I was looking for. I had to make a stop here, albeit with low low expectations. While in my wildest fantasies I had visions of playing for a couple of hours on all the old machines I loved (and doing very well I might add), I realistically prepared myself for something much less than what I would have loved to find. 

Find Super Potato's storefront (and by the way, how great a name is Super Potato?) and you'll notice it's not at street level at all. This is a condition which in my experience is pretty unique to Japan although let's face it, I'm likely lacking in experience worldwide here. You can't just look at whatever bar or restaurant or store is at street level; there are likely to be five or six more businesses up above the sidewalk. And sure enough, two levels above ground level, there's a sign for Super Potato, with (enticingly enough) Pac-Man himself chasing Blinky and Inky.

Find the front door by walking down a very very beige corridor and taking the twisty windy narrow staircase at the back to the third floor where you'll find the beginning of your Super Potato experience. Third and fourth floors are a video game store so let's skip those after a quick posed picture with the giant Mario statue on three and head right to floor five, which is advertised as the "Retro Game Center." This is what I came 6,500 plus miles to find. The anticipation is palpable at this point.

I am glad my expectations were set suitably low but I did find a small pot of gold. No Pac-Man, no Crazy Climber, no Frogger but there were some games I used to play: a single Galaga machine, one Super Mario Brothers machine and one Donkey Kong machine. Good enough. Let's get to it.

I am no longer very good at video games. My 13 or 14 year old self would not be very proud. I'm embarrassed to say that I could not make it beyond the first level of Donkey Kong or Galaga, although I did manage to get to level 2 in Super Mario Brothers (that Nintendo I picked up after college and played for what might have amounted to months of solid play in Cooperstown helped a lot there I'm sure).

I have some good reasons for my lack of performance and I swear they are not excuses. First, I was never very good at Galaga although I certainly spent my fair share of time beyond the first level. Secondly, the two lives that you start with (rather than the customary three; who starts a video game with two lives??) and the fact that I only played once really killed me. And Donkey Kong was just a case of a malfunctioning joystick which I swear cost me at least one life per game (I gave up after four tries).

30 minutes, four games of Donkey Kong, one game of Super Mario Brothers and one game of Galaga. In the old days I would have played for about two hours with that sort of selection and it would have cost me $1.50 rather than the 600 yen I spent in Tokyo (that's about $5.50; yes, it was about a buck a game). Times have changed and I'm really OK with that big picture. I'm also OK with my time at Super Potato. It wasn't very successful and I for sure hoped for more but it was fun just the same. I'm going to continue to check out the old machines on ebay every now and then.

Another Game Over. It's the joystick, I swear.

Oishi

It seems like almost every trip I take gets some sort of food-related post. It seems logical to me; we gotta eat when we are on vacation and part of the fun of discovering a new place is diving into the local cuisine. Sometimes these posts are about specific dishes, like key lime pie or gelato or cheese; but other trips require a more comprehensive look at the wonderful bites I ate while on holiday. I've done this in the past with England, Hawaii and New Mexico although let's face it, any place I go is going to be tough to beat English food.

If there was a place dying for an overview post of all the great food available there, it was Japan. Most of what I've eaten in my life traces its origins back through western cuisine or comes from south of the border which is really a melding of European cooking with the new ingredients found in the new world. Japan is a totally different ball game; sure, I've eaten my fair share of sushi in the United States but there are so many amazing and strange flavors and concepts about food in Asia. My list of foods that I wanted to try in Japan was long. I mean really long. And spoiler alert: I didn't do all of them. So in recognition of my long list and what promises to be a long post, let's dispense with a verbose introduction and get right to it.

Convenience Stores

I get it, this is a strange place to start. But our first two meals in Japan were from convenience stores. Yep, of all the wonderful food available in Tokyo, we went to a convenience store for our first two noshes. Lawson Station. 7-11. FamilyMart. Doesn't matter which one you pick, there's some good stuff available on their shelves and in their coolers. 

Triangular sandwiches (always on white bread with the crust cut off). Rice balls. Onogiri (rice wrapped in seaweed with some sort of filling inside). Rice crackers (lots of rice obviously). Soft drinks you have never heard of. Beer. Snacks upon snacks upon snacks to pack into your backpacks for day trips. You probably can't go wrong. Well, maybe other than the salted plum onogiri. Trust me on this but just stay away from the salted plums in general. Not good. 

The photograph above is of my first breakfast in country. A chicken flavored rice ball wrapped around half a hard boiled egg and a very small can of Kirin Fire iced coffee, which honestly I bought because the can was cool but which woke my jet-lagged self up nicely at 6 am on a Sunday morning. I hardly ever drink coffee but the Fire was pretty good. I tried the Suntory Boss Cafe Au Lait the next morning which just about stopped my heart it had so much caffeine. I stayed away from that for the rest of the trip. I kept going back to convenience stores though. Wish our 7-11s were this good. 

Yakitori

Yakitori is simply pieces of meat or vegetables on skewers which are grilled and then dipped in or brushed with some shoyu (soy sauce based) liquid. It's simple and cheap and sometimes is used as a way to cook the parts of the beast (like chicken gizzards) that you just can't sell any other way at a restaurant. The appeal of yakitori was not in the taste of the meat or veg that we'd be eating (although I certainly hoped to get lucky there) but in the location and atmosphere of the joint we'd be eating in.

I'd seen yakitori restaurants on food shows on television before, tight packed bars in tiny alleys with thin open grilles between the customers and the server working the food and beer, and was dying to eat at one. On our first full day in Tokyo, we made our way to a place called Memory Lane (although we didn't know it was called that when we visited) which is about a five foot wide alley literally lined with yakitori place after yakitori place. Most are just open stalls right off the street that you need to squeeze into to get a spot at the counter and order some food but the more deluxe spots have a second floor accessible via a ladder. I'm not kidding.

At just after 5 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, you'll be hard pressed to find a spot at a yakitori restaurant for food in Memory Lane. We got lucky and spotted four people about to leave a bench with their backs to the alley and pounced on them (the seats on the bench, not the people). From there we ordered four of five skewers of food each along with some beer and watched them get cooked in front of us, smoke pouring off them at times after the flames below licked the meat or bacon wrapped onions or mushrooms cooking before us. A quick dip in sauce after being salted and done on the grill and we had our dinner. The chicken thighs were good, the mushrooms were OK and the onions were about the biggest green onions I'd seen in my life. Could have used more cooking. We definitely enjoyed the atmosphere more than the food. That's OK; that's what I came for.

We later discovered Memory Lane is also known as Piss Alley, so named because at one time there were no bathrooms on the street and I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go. That's been fixed now. Try to find more flavor than we did but go here for sure.

Sushi

If I had a fear about Japanese food, it was that eating sushi there would ruin my taste for sushi back home. We'd watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi before we left home along with some other food documentaries and were afraid we'd eat raw fish so sublime that it would leave us wanting something we couldn't possibly get back home.

I'm both disappointed and glad to report that didn't happen. Disappointed because I didn't have sushi in Japan that was so much more delicious than I can get here at home; glad because, well, I still want to enjoy sushi at home. And I still can.

We ate sushi in both Tokyo and Kyoto and had a little sashimi with our casual kaiseki meal on Miyajima Island. We didn't go visit Jiro Ono's place or anything like it because (a) we didn't have reservations and (b) didn't really want to spend close to $300 on one meal of sushi. That's per person, folks. The best sushi we had in Japan was at a spot next to the Doc Marten's store in Kyoto which I don't know the name of but whose sushi is pictured above.

Order a combo in Japan and you'll likely get some sort of presentation like the box shown above. Order individual pieces and you might get it dropped right on the counter where my pickled ginger is. I did a bit of both and ended that night with the best octopus (it had taste and was not rubbery), fatty tuna (so buttery but with some flavor and not just fat), uni or sea urchin (the creamiest ever) and eel (it was totally the crispy crusty edges that made the difference) that I have ever eaten in my life. You won't get grated wasabi to make some soy and wasabi slurry to soak your rice in before shoveling it in your mouth and that's OK.

A high end sushi place definitely stands out as one place that we missed food-wise on this trip. I'm financially richer for skipping it but I don't understand if I'm actually richer as a person for doing that. Perhaps next time. I still had some of the best sushi of my life.

Noodles

I have to confess I'm not much of a noodles guy. At one time in my life I used to eat a box of spaghetti at a time when I was in grad school but those meals were always all about the sauce which back then usually meant a whole jar of Newman's Own Sockaroni sauce mixed with a healthy amount of full fat sour cream.

So it was with a little trepidation that I so enthusiastically put noodles on my Japan list but they are such a staple that I had to. Noodles in Japan might mean tens of different varieties. It seems like each locality has their own special variant unique to that location. To make things easier for myself I stuck to ramen (which I'll generically classify as thin wheat noodles), soba (which I'll call similar to ramen but made out of buckwheat) and udon (which I'll just call thick noodles and which are shown above).

I gotta tell you, it's still all about the sauce for me, even in Japan, although sauce here might be better called broth which might be made up of a number of different ingredients to meld into something that is delicious. Yep, there are toppings you can get added onto your bowl of noodles like slices of pork or leeks or hard-boiled eggs or tempura pieces of shrimp or whatever else is on the menu. It's still, for me, all about the sauce.

The verdict? For me (and keep in mind I lack a good palate; hit me over the head with flavor please), the rich curry broth with a generous dose of fatty meat scraps and the sesame / spicy miso soybean paste broth were worth dreaming about again. Those represented my udon and ramen experiences respectively but I think I could have switched the noodles in both those dishes and been no worse off. Sure the pork was delicious in the ramen but it's still about the sauce.

If there's one thing to be said in favor of noodles, it's that they are extremely cheap. 1,300 yen (that's less than $12) got me a big dish of udon for me and my girlfriend along with a beer for me. Find some good sauce or broth and I'm good with these any day. But you gotta pick a good sauce.

Gyoza

I thought my food list was pretty comprehensive before I left for Japan. When I got to Kyoto I realized I had forgotten all about gyoza, or Japanese dumplings, when we stumbled across Gyoza Chaochao near the Kama River with a line out the door representing about a 45 minute wait. Gyoza got added to my list right there and then. The take out beers the place offered were helpful with the waiting.

The gyoza I am used to eating here at home are typically filled with pork, chicken or vegetables and I usually keep some ponzu sauce (soy mixed with citrus) on hand for dipping. Gyoza Chaochao turned all my ideas about these dumplings on their head. Mushroom: good. Curry: really good. Pork: OK. Onion: OK. Tomato sauce and mozzarella: interesting. Ginger: amazing.

I'm maybe being a little harsh with my ratings here. All these gyoza were perfectly crispy on one side and soft and well cooked on the other. We ordered them along with some pickled cucumbers that made us order a second dish of them and the table was equipped with four sauces (soy vinegar, miso, chile oil and some kind of spicy paste) to dip them in.

Gyoza Chaochao is a bare bones place. A small bar wrapping the frenetic food prep area with a few wooden tables scattered along the back and side walls. Ordering is quick and ordering seconds is definitely not frowned upon. I think I could have kept popping these things into my mouth along with more beer for a while. I'll say it again: the ginger ones were the best. And I can't believe I think that. They were just out of this world good.

Strawberry Pocky Sticks

I have many food weaknesses. And drink weaknesses for that matter. I suppose some people that know me reasonably well know what some of these are. One of my more obscure weaknesses is for fake strawberry flavor. And so even though Pocky Sticks can be picked up at 7-11 or FamilyMart and so are technically a subset of convenience store food, they get their own category because they are just so freaking good.

Maybe I should start with explaining Pocky Sticks. Think cookies baked into long thin sticks. They are then dipped in either chocolate or chocolate with coconut or green tea flavored icing or whatever it is or the same stuff just in fake strawberry flavor. I love these things. Compared to my other fake strawberry weaknesses like strawberry iced donuts or strawberry Harry and David maltballs (which actually require you to buy the neapolitan flavor which really only has 1/3 strawberry), Pocky Sticks feel almost healthy. I'd buy them all the time if they had them at U.S. 7-11s. And a box is less than $1.50. I brought two boxes back. Yummy!!!

Nishiki Market

Yes, the picture above does indeed show sparrows on a stick. Yes, the little bird sparrow. The same ones we have in the United States. The cutout picture of a sparrow above the actual product helps, right? 

Nishiki Market is not exactly a food. I get that. But in the same spirit that allowed me to put Hilo Farmer's Market in my Hawaii food post, I'm making the same exception for Nishiki Market. 

Walk away from the Kama River in Kyoto and navigate the mostly-gridlike but sometime maze-y covered passages of the city and you might find yourself at Nishiki Market, a five or six block long stretch of food stalls selling cook at home meats and vegetables and other things edible but also featuring an incredible array of foods available for takeout. Head over there at about 10 a.m. and you might find something good to nibble on for a late breakfast or early lunch like we did in our first day in Kyoto. There's some good stuff to be had here. 

Raw fish? Yep? Octopus? Got that too in both large tentacle and baby-with-head-stuffed-with-quail-egg form. Red bean paste buns and sweets? Yes and yes. Pickled everything? Yes, you can find that here. Eggs? For sure. Chicken? Oh yes. Nuts and sweets? Yes and yes. Anything you can think of eating on a stick or with your hands or with chopsticks in Japan (that's important), I think you'll generally get it at Nishiki Market. Even sparrow on a stick. 

My brunch that day? Two kinds of omelettes (I'm chowing down on one with onion and chicken in the top picture of this post). A piece of conger pike eel on stick. Samples of cookie-like things with dried peas and dried broad beans. Some pieces of fried chicken in a cup. About a half a roasted chestnut. Some tuna sashimi on a stick. And a yuzu flavored kudzu starch bun filled with adzuki bean paste. This last thing was amazingly delicious. It was basically a citrus flavored gel wrapped around a sweet bean paste filling. I'm sure if I were to go back to Nishiki Market, I'd mix things up. There's so much to browse and sample here. 

Tofu

You didn't think I could get out of this post without talking about tofu, or coagulated soy milk pressed into solids (yummy!!!), did you? Forget everything you think you know about this food for a moment. I also understand that the photo above looks a bit unappetizing or exactly what you might expect tofu to look like (the tofu is the whitish mass towards the bottom of the food) but hey, it was dark and this stuff was good.

If there's a place to eat tofu in this world and have it taste good, it's Kyoto. They are supposed to have the best in the world. To make sure we slid all our chips into the center of the table on this one (I mean it's tofu; we need the best chance we can get) we picked what is allegedly the best tofu restaurant in Kyoto and splurged on a multi-course prix fixe meal (or omakase in Japan) at Tousuiro. A walk down a dark alley to a spot with two lighted paper lanterns, push aside the curtain and enter the door, shoes off and you are ready to be seated. We had to take an outdoor seat, which sounds wonderful and it was, except we had to sit on the floor. 200 plus pound late 40s American men sometimes don't do well on the floor.

I'll admit that I haven't eaten a lot of tofu in my life. In fact, most of it has probably been in soups from Chinese and Japanese restaurants. I'll also admit that the tofu we had in Tousuiro was delicious. It came in dish after dish of tofu-focused plates. In most cases (and I think this was the key here) it was mixed or flavored with other components. The tofu with garfish shown in the photograph above was really flavorful but the best was the pea tofu and corn tofu that came with my very first dish. The texture of most all of the tofu we ate that night was like a farmer's cheese - creamy and chewy with a course texture but soft. I'm not sure if all tofu in Japan tasted this way but if it did, I'd eat it a lot more. Worth a small splurge on this one, although I'd pass on the sitting on the floor thing. Ironically, that cost extra.

French Pastries

Before we left for Japan, we met an incredible number of people who had been to Japan and got lots of advice about what to do and where to eat. One of the strangest pieces of advice we got was that we had to eat some French pastries for breakfast because somehow I guess the Japanese love the French and French food. There was no way I was going to eat French food in Japan. No way!

Sometimes things just don't work out the way you thought because there we were our last morning in Kyoto getting some French pastries to go in the Sizuya bakery near our hotel before we boarded the shinkansen (or bullet train) for Hiroshima. That was the third morning in a row we had eaten at Sizuya. No way, huh? Nice resolve!

So what's good? Well, the yellow iced donut looking things in the picture above are filled with cantaloupe melon flavored cream and they are good. The things to the right and below of the donuts (not the hot dog-looking thing; the yellowish oval looking things next to it) are some sort of warmish croque monsieurs and they are incredible. Ham, cheese, bread and some sort of not solid but not runny béchamel sauce on the top. Three mornings in a row I ate these before heading out sightseeing. Don't pass this up.

Sake
 

Sake, it seemed, was destined to be my great disappointment in Japanese food and drink. I had these visions of getting an introduction to sake, or what is sometimes called rice wine even thought it's brewed like beer, before heading to Japan and then really indulging in the stuff when I got there. I thought I'd be hanging out in sake bars with the locals discovering everything there is to know about the stuff.

Too bad I don't like it. I tried. I had sake at a Japanese restaurant in D.C. before I left home and my mom even bought me a couple of bottles to practice with. But it was the sweet sake that I bought at sumo my first day in Tokyo that killed almost all my appetite for discovery here. I guess the sweetness was OK but when I got down towards the bottom of the can there was a lumpy texture like rice pudding. No thanks.

But if there's one thing in life I can be persistent about it's alcohol and being in Kyoto, where they have brewed sake for centuries in the Fushimi section of town, I had to give it one more shot. So after a day of exploring temples in Nara, we hopped off the JR Line and made our way towards the Gekkeikan brewery, a place with 380 years (!!) of sake brewing history in hopes of finding some local sake joint.

We didn't find what we were looking for. But we did find a makeshift stall outside the brewery set up for after work Friday happy hour, although we ended up being the only ones there. Some pointing and holding up fingers got me through three cups of sake, two number ones and one number three if I'm remembering it correctly. Now this could be the worst sake in Japan for all I know but to me it tasted good and it was some smooth drinking. No sweetness, no alcohol flavor that you can get sometimes with sake and a taste of roasted chocolate on the last cup I drank redeemed my sake quest in Japan. Back to beer after that though. You can never go wrong with beer.

Okonomiyaki

One of the things that is really important to me when I'm traveling abroad (or at home for that matter) is to seek out local food specialties. In the west of Japan, okonomiyaki or a Japanese pancake (what in America we'd call a crepe) is apparently the thing to get so we made it a point to seek one of these out when in Hiroshima, which is about as west as we got while still being in anything resembling an urban center. Lucky for us, there's a district in Hiroshima where you can pretty much get nothing but okonomiyaki.

If there's theater in food preparation in Japan, it's probably to be found in a high end sushi joint, where you can watch the sushi master delicately craft each piece of nigiri from the most carefully prepared fresh fish and the perfect amount of sticky rice, maybe a little wasabi and a sublime wash of soy. If there's budget theater in food preparation, it's got to be okonomiyaki.

I don't even know how to describe the process of constructing one of these things so I'll just launch into it. It all starts with a circle of pancake batter spread on a flattop grill followed by a sprinkling of seasoning or maybe some herbs. And that's about as normal as it gets.

Next up? Cabbage. And when I say cabbage I mean about a half a head of cabbage. Get ready to eat because this thing is going to fill you up for hours. After the cabbage comes the bean sprouts and then some cobwebby looking things that I'm mostly sure weren't actual cobwebs but I couldn't be positive. Add some peanuts, what appeared to be crumbled rice cakes and top with a few strips of bacon or maybe pork belly. What you have at this point is a close to Mount Fuji sized mound of food cooking away on the grill top. See above if you need help.

That's when the protein (in my case shrimp) and the noodles come out. They get cooked alongside the cabbage etc. mountain after it is flipped (so the pancake is now on top of the whole assemblage). Eventually, and pretty quickly by the way, the whole thing is going to come together as a single ensemble. But not before an egg is added to the mix for some extra nourishment. Look, there's always room for eggs, right? Oh, and some sweet and umami okonomiyaki sauce on top to round out the flavors. I mean, what's an okonomiyaki without okonmiyaki sauce?

As a mid-day meal, this experience was pretty intense. Once it gets to your table you are presented with some chopsticks and something that looks like a trowel that you would use to spread grout to cut the whole thing. All the ingredients meld together to create a meal unlike anything I have ever had before. Hot, sweet, earthy, eggy, filling and satisfying. This was also perhaps the most memorable meal from an experiential standpoint we had in Japan. And yes, I ate the whole thing and gained a few pounds.

Japanese Curry

If there's a meal I crave now that I'm back home in the United States, it's Japanese curry. There are two ironies here: (1) This is truly an adopted food as opposed to being a native dish; curry apparently made it's way east to Japan from India courtesy of the British. And (2) we ate our lone meal of Japanese curry at a fast food restaurant, the available-almost-everywhere-and-sometimes-even-24-hours-per-day CoCo Curry. Yes, you read that right: I crave Japanese fast food.

Not only is Japanese curry delicious, it also defies the attractive food is the tastiest food axiom that honestly I kind of just made up. This is one ugly plate: a circular dish with a flattened semicircle of white rice in a half moon shape on one side and the other flooded with brown curry gravy. Add some toppings for some more taste and texture but honestly I think the chunks of meat and veg you can choose as extras make it less pleasing to the eye. But, man...is it tasty.

At CoCo, your meal is totally customizable. Start with the sauce (I went with beef curry) and then the quantity of rice (I stuck to the standard 300 grams). Next choice? Spice level. I went with 3, which was perfect for me and I love spicy food; you can go up to 10 if you want and I can't imagine how painful that would be. Grab some toppings (fried chicken, corn and potatoes for me although the potatoes turned out to be potato salad on the side) and you are ready to go. Quick and hearty with a great curry flavor with heat that builds as you eat. I could go for some of this stuff right now. If I ever go back to Japan, I'm eating two or three meals at CoCo.

Eel

We splurged twice for food in Japan. Once on tofu and once on eel. Our destination for our eel meal was the almost 200 year old family run restaurant Nodaiwa, which we found close to the Tokyo Tower after learning how to handle a katana for an hour or so (but that's another story).

Nodaiwa looks and feels like it's a couple of centuries old. The decor is traditional and intricate and formal and the presentation of the dishes matches the building's appeal. We had a quick sit in the lobby of the place while we waited for our table to free up and we smelled and watched. After ordering, we were presented with several dishes: a bed of rice in a beautiful lacquered wooden box with two side dishes of pickled things and a small cup of eel liver soup. You read that last part right.

While the eel liver soup disappointed on flavor a bit (it was watery and I didn't dare eat the two livers at the bottom of the cup), the eel which was lovingly coated with sweet eel sauce that had seeped just a bit into the rice below. Nodaiwa apparently only cooks wild caught eel and apparently the discerning diner can tell the difference. I guess I'm not experienced enough here but it tasted pretty darned good to me. There was a smoky barbecued flavor beneath the sauce that I found very satisfying. Not Japanese curry, but probably worth the splurge. I'd recommend checking this place out.

And just like that we are done with Japanese food for this post.

Wow that was long. I'm not sure I've explored more different foods ever on a trip. And yes, as I stated earlier in this post, we actually didn't cover everything on my list. Missing? Some sort of food at an izakaya and a kaiseki meal, neither of which are foods but are instead types of restaurants or meals.

Izakaya are basically Japanese pubs, places to drink sake and beer that also happen to serve bites of food. Kaiseki are elaborate multi-course (like a dozen or more) meals prepared in a specific sequence using local and seasonal ingredients. We sort of had a casual kaiseki (meaning all the food is there but delivered at one time) at our hotel on Miyajima Island but I'm not counting that as checking the box. Something to go back for next time. As well as plenty of CoCo Curry.