O Canada

Before I hit the "Publish" button on this post today, I had written exactly one piece in the last 12 years about time that I had spent in Canada. That post was in 2017, and we were really only in Canada because that's where our cruise ship to Alaska was departing from. 

Where did all the other posts about Canada go to, you might ask? Where are all the words and paragraphs about the country that shares the longest land border with the United States of America?

There aren't any. 

Know why? Because I've never intentionally planned a vacation to Canada. Never. I went to Montreal for a couple of Thanksgivings with my parents in high school but that wasn't me planning the vacation. I just went along, having been afforded no real choice in the matter. And sure, I've wandered to Toronto a few times since I turned 18 to see a basketball game and go to a baseball game (that wasn't really the intent but that's what I did) and go to the Toronto Zoo, but those didn't count really either. Nor really do the less than 24 hours we spent in Vancouver in 2017. I mean, if the boat had departed from Seattle, I would still not have visited Vancouver.

That trip to the Zoo, by the way, was the only time I have ever spent the night in a car in a parking lot. In the middle of winter. In Toronto. It was actually one of the warmest nights I've ever spent in my life. I had blankets and slept in my clothes, what can I say?

The first of two Tim Hortons we visited in Golden, BC (population 3,986-ish). The other Tims is better.

So all that stops today because here is a post that's completely and unabashedly about Canada. Why, you may ask? Well...because right after my 57th birthday at the end of June, I finally took a trip to Canada that I planned. Not for a day on the way to catch a boat. Not for an accidental or intentional weekend away. A real, honest to God vacation in Canada. Eight nights! And behold: there will be blog posts about Canada this year. 

And maybe, just maybe...next year as well (our next Canada trip is already booked!).

Why Canada in 2025? Well, I guess it started when it came time to add a fourth weeklong trip to our 2025 travel itinerary, I thought Rocky Mountains and back to Yellowstone National Park. But...I didn't really want to spend time in the center of the United States. I mean, not really. Not this year. Then I had a thought. Or an inspiration maybe. I remembered the Rockies actually go all the way north of the border and into Canada. So I looked to the Great White North and found our fourth trip. Just like that, we decided to go to Canada. 

Was it just like the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Yellowstone National Park? Nope! No it wasn't. It was like the Canadian Rockies. They are different places in so many ways. We'll get to all that just soon enough including all sorts of stuff about mountains, birds, bears, kayaking, hiking, waterfalls, early sunrises, late sunsets, pine trees, trout, sheep, flowers, chairs, lakes, glaciers, crazy-colored water and lots and lots of French fries with gravy and maybe some Tim Hortons coffee with a Canadian maple donut or two (so good...). OK, so maybe I won't cover all of that. We'll see.

And as an aside...what's the deal with apostrophes at Tim Hortons? I thought the place was founded by a dude named Tim Horton and because they are his stores, the "s" after Horton is is some sort of possessive denotation. Yes? Or no? Because there's no apostrophe. Also when they shorten the name to Tims, it's also missing an apostrophe. So confused here. Why isn't it "Tim Horton's" and "Tim's"?

Avalanche warning sign in Yoho National Park. Lots of avalanche signs in the Canadian Rockies.

Our entry point for this trip was Calgary, Alberta. I suppose Calgary is likely on the plains of Canada but hop in a car and drive an hour or maybe a bit more west and you'll be on the edge or really into the Rockies depending on how fast you feel like rolling down the Trans-Canada Highway. I'm not sure Canadians are big speeders. I felt like we were most often the fastest car on the road and I by no means usually have a lead foot. 

When we visited Rocky Mountain National Park in 2020, we flew to Denver, stopped there for a night but did literally nothing else except eat dinner and sleep and then split for the mountains the next morning. We did something similar when we visited Yellowstone later that same year: flew to Salt Lake City, landed and then drove straight through Idaho to Jackson, Wyoming.

We didn't do that with Calgary on this trip. After six nights in eastern British Columbia, we spent the last two nights of this vacation in downtown Calgary. And as luck would have it, we checked in to our hotel in that city the day before the start of the Calgary Stampede, which is like the biggest event of the year and it's not even close in Southern Alberta.

Let me say this about the Calgary Stampede and the city of Calgary in general: it's awesome!

Calgary Stampede parade. Shania Twain was the grand marshal.

I have to say that the skyline of Calgary is not much to look at. It's not New York or Chicago or Los Angeles (yes...LA has a skyline!!) or Las Vegas or some of our more famous and iconic cities in the United States. But the downtown is compact, dense, lived in, full of stores and hotels and restaurants and just 15 minutes or so outside of town you can find a fish hatchery or a park packed full of yellow warblers in the summer. And you know...if you spend about 90 minutes driving west you are in the Rockies surrounded by some of the most gorgeous country I've ever been in.

Let me say for the record that I've wanted to visit a fish hatchery for several years now. I saw one somewhere in some wooded area in the United States a few years ago and thought maybe it would be cool to go check one out. By the time I'd processed that thought, we had moved on from whatever hatchery inspired that idea but in Calgary I couldn't resist. It's basically like a fish farm where they grow fish. Trout in Calgary. Fascinating stuff. But that's not what this post is about.

Let me also say that those warblers I wrote about at the end of last year as migratory attractions in Virginia spend their whole summer in Canada and there is a park called Inglewood Bird Sanctuary in Calgary that is like yellow warbler central. We'd never seen one of these birds in person before and we managed maybe eight or nine in a couple of hours one morning and heard many, many more.

About 64,000 trout and one yellow warbler. I'm rounding up on the fish.

So about that Stampede. Every July, Calgary hosts a 10 day event which can only be described as a celebration of all things horse and agricultural and cowboy and Native American. I don't know how else to put it. Rodeo? Sure, they got that. Pavilions with farm animals? Oh yeah. A Native American camp with displays about indigenous life? Yep, got that too. Parade with Shania Twain as grand marshal? Yes, sir! Although not every year on Shania. Chuck wagon races? Unbelievably, absolutely. Rides, food stalls and more cowboy hats than you have ever seen in your life? Yahoo!!!!!

Have you ever seen an indigenous relay race? I hadn't either. I suggest if you ever get a chance to do so that you check one out and get as close to the relay exchange point as possible. We saw two heats of these things as part of the opening night Evening Show (there's one each of the ten nights of the Stampede) which features a twin bill of these races and some chuck wagon races, which is exactly what it sounds like...a chuck wagon being pulled around a race track by four horses in front of each wagon.

These relay races...I knew they were on horseback so I figured there would be four or so horses with riders who would each do a lap and then hand a baton to the next mounted teammate and so on until all the laps were done and someone finished first. Not so. It's one dude racing against three other dudes riding a horse bareback around a track; dismounting and getting on a second horse (also bareback); then switching to a third horse after the second lap; and finishing the third and final lap on a third horse, and of course no saddle on that one either. 

I don't know that I've seen an athletic contest more incredible and I've seen my fair share of athletic events in my life. I didn't know someone could jump from the ground onto a horse's back with no help or hands and then take off on said horse less than about a second after he landed on the horse's back. We saw messed up horse transfers, we saw someone fall off a horse and we saw a horse handler (someone holds the horses in place waiting for transfer) or two get knocked over during a horse exchange. But when this was done right...just amazing. The speed which these guys come into the exchange is just wow! They basically fly off one horse and leap right onto the next. I don't know what to say. I didn't expect something like this out of the Stampede Evening Show. I'm still stunned.

I don't know if I'll ever make it to a second Stampede but I have to tell you (and I'm shocked to be writing this), I'm not ruling it out.

Chuck wagon races and Native American hoop dancer. Calgary Stampede. Lots of cowboy hats.

Our opening day Stampede visit was on July 4, which of course is Independence Day in the United States. We knew there would be fireworks after the evening show. We didn't know exactly how long we'd have to wait for them (the Evening Show starts at 7:30 pm but sun doesn't set until after 10) but we knew there would be some. We hoped that these fireworks would be our second of this trip, expecting some on Canada Day (July 1) only to be denied by threat of wildfire. That's cool. I've been near enough to one wildfire in my life already and I'm good not being near one again.

I have never been to a fireworks show like we saw that night. It was absolutely spectacular. There were more fireworks for longer than I can ever remember seeing in one place at one time. The cover picture of this post is one shot from the end sequence that night. It looks like an artist's rendering but I assure you, it's totally and completely real. Canada gave me my best July 4 fireworks ever. Go figure!

I've been reading books this year. I try to read a book or two about new places we visit to get myself psyched up for the experience and maybe to learn a thing or two before I arrive someplace new. One of the two books I read before this trip was about a solo trip across Canada with a canoe that author Adam Shoalts made in 2017. It's called "Beyond The Trees" and it kept me occupied for a few weeks this winter and spring. There's one part of the book that reads as follows:

"I enjoy returning to old haunts as much as the next person, but they don't have quite the same magical allure as unknown places..."

We travel a lot more than a lot of people we know. We for sure have some old haunts we love to go back to. We spend time in New York City every year and we've already spent a week this year re-visiting Tokyo, which I can see us visiting many times in the future if we have time and enough resources to keep knocking off new places and going back to places we love. Canada was not new to us, but Calgary and the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia sure were unknown places and they both definitely had a lot of magical allure. Who knows...maybe one day we might consider that corner of the globe as an old haunt. 

Blog posts about mountains and other stuff to follow.

Happy Canada Day! (July 1) from Jasper National Park.

57

 

Today is my 57th birthday. It's been one of the most challenging years of my life and I mean that in a number of ways. Family-wise, my 57th year on this planet was stressful and emotional unlike any other year, particularly the last five months. I've cried more than I have in years and it's all about my parents. I'm not going to expand on that at all in this blog but suffice it to say while everyone I care the most about is thankfully still alive and sticking together, it has not been easy. I have often written thankful words on this day of the year in the last dozen years and today is no different. I am healthy and alive and able to do the things that make me feel alive. I am extremely fortunate.

That includes being able to travel and explore our planet.

Calendar year 2024 was a bit of a tough travel year. Easier than other stuff that was to come after the new year in '25 but still ultimately not as satisfying as some past years. It featured two week-plus-long trips (that's too few, by the way) and a lot of work travel. The time after my birthday was extra tough: just one vacation to the country where I was born (England) and a ton of not traveling and not exploring. Except for work. And then not so much the exploring even though I tried.

So in 2025, I've taken steps to buck that one year travel trend. I am, after all, in control a bit of some of this stuff. We've already completed a week each in Belize (with a day trip to Guatemala) and Tokyo. Central America and Japan are two of my favorite parts of the world so I'm thrilled to have been able to visit each in the first half of this year. Give me time in the jungle or Japanese culture and food every day for a week or more and I'll be a happy man. Just as long as I can retreat to a comfy hotel at the end of the jungle days, that is.

On those two trips, I knocked one of my all time must visit spots off my list (Guatemala's Tikal), found some of my favorite birds (toucans) and immersed myself in one of the world's most anticipated events of each year in the blooming of the sakura or cherry blossoms in the Japanese spring. Last year it was lunar new year in southeast Asia; this year it was sakura-watching. These are not easy spots to get to and I know not everyone can do these things on demand like we have done in the last 18 months. Again, I am extremely lucky.

Decorated stone statues near the Tokyo Tower in Tokyo, the biggest city I visited this year.

Traditionally on this date's post, I check in on the goals that I set for myself as a part of this blog. But last year, I abandoned that routine, with a determination to go where I felt like it without conforming to some sort of master plan. This year, I remain true to that idea. I am still refusing to establish goals. My personal travel list is just so long and I don't see a need to prioritize my travel in five year chunks any more. I am confident that there are amazing, mind-blowing sights to see out there and I am sure I can find some to take in every year.

So what does the next year hold, travel-wise? Well, honestly it's a little murky, but the balance of 2025 looks like nothing inside the United States (weekend trips don't count) which would make 2025 only the second year that I've been writing this blog that I didn't travel somewhere in my home country that made it into the pages of this blog (2019 was the other year with trips to New Zealand, Peru and Ireland / Northern Ireland that year). Not going to lie here, we are deliberately focused outside of our borders. 

We do have two trips booked and (mostly) planned already to the Canadian Rockies and South Africa which should keep us very well occupied for the remainder of 2025 but 2026 is a blank canvas. There are no flights or hotels booked at all beyond this year we are in right now. That's extremely unusual for us and it's both exciting and daunting at the same time. Don't get me wrong, we have some ideas. Just no commitments yet. Don't worry, we'll fill up 2026 very soon, I'm sure of it. If nothing else, we need to get to Europe. I feel confident we will.

For the first five birthday posts on this blog (this is number 13), I was at home somewhere in Arlington, Virginia and the cover picture of this post featured me having a drink somewhere near to where I lived. In the seven subsequent posts, I was mostly on the road, showing up in pics taken in the New York City, Utah, Scotland and the Napa Valley (twice). Today, I am once again at home. But Canada beckons. I am super excited to fly to Calgary in the next month and start exploring the six national parks we have on our list out there. This world is a wonderful place. I can't wait to see what the next year brings for me. I know it's going to be awesome exploring some new places.

The harbor (or harbour) at Mousehole (pronounced mow-zul). Possibly the smallest town I visited this year.

Gashapon

This is my last Japan post from our 2025 Tokyo trip. Here's hoping it won't be another seven years before we make it back over there. But then again, there are so many places to go...

Let's start this post in a place that is decidedly not Japan.

I first set foot in the United States in July of 1979. I was an 11 year old kid born and raised in England who was suddenly taken from the only country I had ever lived in and moved an ocean away. Lest this sound like some sort of kidnapping, let me assure you this move was entirely consensual. My parents asked the opinion of both me and my sister and I (at least) was all in from the get go.

Being moved from the United Kingdom to America as a child in the late 1970s involved a good amount of complete culture shock. I know, I know, today there are a lot of similarities between the two places when it comes to things kids care about. But back then? Not so much. American candy bars were inferior. Comic books in the U.S. told a story that lasted months rather than a single page. The crisp selection in the States was miserable. And I'd never even been to a McDonald's. Fast food? What's THAT!?!? OK...so fast food was an upgrade.

Then there were trips to the grocery store. On the way out, there were these machines near the exit doors. What were these? Gumball machines? Didn't have those in England. How awesome are these, especially ones that dispense toys in little plastic capsules rather than gum? Put in a quarter and rotate that handle and some stickers or a miniature (American) football helmet or some sort of other toy comes out? I'm sold! This is definitely an upgrade to my 11 year old life.

Gashapon store near Sensō-ji Temple.

While I certainly didn't know it at the time, vending machines like the ones I found in American supermarkets in the late '70s have been around since the late 1800s. They have been used to sell gum and postcards and tobacco and soft drinks and all sorts of other products. Eventually at some point between the late 19th century and the 1960s, these things branched out and morphed into automated purveyors of small plastic toys for kids to take their chance at dropping a coin into a slot, turning a crank handle and finding something to play with. I fell in love on sight, even if I couldn't really afford to put too much money into these things.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one in the world not from the United States who was fascinated with these things. In the 1960s, they were introduced to Japan. And like some things when the Japanese get a hold of them, being in Japan elevated these little toy-containing plastic capsules with into what can only be described as an artform combined with a bit of a national obsession. They called them gashapon, apparently named after the sound that the crank handle makes (gasha) combined with the "pon" sound (whatever that is...) when the capsule drops into the dispenser place. It's an onomatopoeia. Remember 6th grade English? If not, Google it!

Gashapon machines in Japan are not confined to grocery stores. They can be found just about everywhere. What does everywhere mean? Try stores crammed into any sort of available space. Try in train stations. Try on street corners. Or jammed between buildings off of streets. Pretty much anywhere appears to be fair game for gashapon machines. 

We dabbled in these things a bit in Akihabara in 2017 and then again in Singapore last year. With our second full trip to Japan, we had to go find some of these things in a serious way. We were on a mission.

Train station gashapon.

Maybe a terminology check is in order before I continue. I should mention that there are a variety of different spellings and pronunciations of gashapon. Google "gatchapon", "gachapon" or "gasha gasha" and you'll find they all mean the same thing. I'm sticking with gashapon. 

So why do I want a whole series of little pieces of plastic out of gashapon machines? Well, I don't necessarily, but I have a niece who is 12 years old who's a little enamored of these things and Japan's culture in general. With this quest, I decided to combine my desire to do something completely and uniquely Japanese with an ability to make someone other than me happy as the end result.

Her request? One Piece. Demon Slayer. Dandadan. Anime / manga series that she watches. We found a ton of One Piece stuff last year in Singapore so we figured we'd be pretty much good there. The rest? Well...we'd just have to see. 

Clearly, by the cover picture of this post, we found some One Piece stuff.

Three. Thousand. Gashapon.

I will say that on this trip, we spent a surprising amount of time looking around gashapon stores, if that's even the correct term. We bought from machines on the street. We bought from machines in an open air place that can only reasonable be described as an L-shaped dead end corridor. And we shopped but didn't actually buy at a gashapon-packed (and I DO mean PACKED) room near Tokyo's famous Sensō-ji Temple. 

But we figured if we were really serious about this whole gashapon quest, we needed to visit somewhere that had more of these things than any other place on the planet. Fortunately for us, that place exists in Tokyo. It's in the Sunshine City Mall. Want to go shopping for gashapon? Go visit a place that has 3,000 of them in one very tight corner of a shopping mall. Think there's a typo there? Let me spell it out more clearly: Three. Thousand.

So let me say that I don't get some of this. Did we buy some things for my niece? You bet we did. Did we buy some things for ourselves? Oh yes, I fell for one of the miniature historic temple / shrine torii and we went in hard (meaning like the equivalent of all of $10...) on Sanrio's "Ate Too Much" toys. But I have to tell you, I don't get some of it. And yes, I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for some of this stuff.

I can understand the Sanrio stuff and the One Piece figures and the Miffy stuff. I actually think the One Piece figures are super well executed and detailed; the couple of things that we picked up last year in Singapore (and shown below) are just exquisite. I can even understand (and I can't believe I'm writing this...) the miniature Honda Civic wheel rims key rings. It's a custom car street racing thing, right? Like Fast and Furious? Maybe?

Look...I'm 56 years old. I'm allowed to be a little out of touch.

Last year's One Piece haul from Singapore.

So honestly, and accepting the Japanese have a fascination with like all things miniature and particularly food-related things, I struggle with at least a couple of the machines in the 3,000 machine gashapon store. I can't blow-by-blow this stuff but let me use two things as an example of my confusion.

First (and I know this has nothing to do with food but I'll get to that part), there was a machine that sold miniature folding stools. Like step stools that are in their real-life, full-size versions like eight inches high and let you get all of eight inches above the floor level by taking one step up onto them. And yes, when they are not needed they fold into like a two inch vertical piece of plastic. Folding stools. We have a couple of these at home and they serve their purpose just fine when we need to reach that highest shelf in a closet. 

Why does anyone need this in miniature form? Why? What do you do with this? And assuming part of the fun here is to collect the whole set...why on Earth do you need six different miniature folding stools?

Same question really but different machine: the miniature Johnsonville brats machine. Like brats like bratwurst. The sausages that people put on their grills in summer and feel like they are eating something really amazing from Wisconsin. Why do you need a packet of six tiny sausages? Is there some Japanese collector culture where people accumulate a collection of packaged groceries of a specific scale? These also, by the way, come in different flavors. Is the expectation the someone out there keeps putting yen into these machines until he or she owns all five flavors of tiny Johnsonville brats? 

Really? Can anyone help me out here?

By the way, I can totally believe there's a Japanese collector culture centered around miniature food of a specific scale. Absolutely no doubt about that.

Who needs six (or one, even) tiny folding stools?

Maybe the intricacies of gashapon culture are not to be explored and known by a middle-aged gaijin. After all, we were sent to Tokyo with some marching orders. We needed to track down these anime / manga souvenirs. And the Sunshine City Mall was our best hope.

There's no map, by the way. I don't mean to the Mall. Google Maps got us there just fine. But once you get inside the store, there's no map. There's no index or grid that shows what is where. You are just faced with 3,000 identical looking machines in row after row as far as you can see punctuated by displays showing (and I'm guessing a bit here...) some of most popular gashapon toys in their full set form. You know...so you can want it.

So after walking around for a bit we did what we would in any other place...we asked for help. OK, I didn't ask for help since I'm a dude. WE asked for help. In English of course. In Japan. It wasn't the easiest conversation but honestly considering we would have stood no chance of having this exchange in Japanese, it was pretty effective. There was some looking at a sort of a map of the store, some reference to "boys' machines" and a direction to go towards the back of the store.

What did we do in the back of the store? Asked again. 

Dandadan? Nothing. 

Demon Slayer? One machine. One is better than none. 

We found One Piece just fine on our own. No shortage of One Piece machines. Heck, they have an entire One Piece store in the Mall. One Piece is somewhat popular in Japan.

Gashapon store display showing sets of gashapon toys. Miffy in the lower right. One Piece is top shelf.

Three new One Piece machines. One Demon Slayer machine. Yen in. One from each machine. Guaranteed no duplicates. We were traveling light. And how many of these things can you really collect anyway? Especially after we almost emptied the Sanrio Ate Too Much machine later in the week. And admittedly, that was for us. 

Was it worth traipsing halfway across Tokyo to go to a gashapon machine store? Absolutely. No doubt about it. I feel more connected to a Japanese obsession now. Was it everything I intended it to be? Probably not. I had visions of us coming home with unique souvenirs that spoke to us and encapsulated our entire 2025 trip symbolically. Aiming a little high there. But we did have fun and we accomplished our mission. I won't be doing this again (meaning heading to Sunshine City Mall for this) but I'm always going to sneak a peek at what we might be able to get by turning that gashapon machine wheel just like I used to do when pushing the grocery cart our of the store in 1979 Connecticut. 

That fascination will never grow old. It's just a lot more fascinating in Japan than what I can find at my local Safeway.

Japan posts over. Now I need to get on the road again.

Most of our 2025 haul: 3x One Piece; 1x Demon Slayer (top). Miniature torii (bottom).

Sweet Potato Town

The planning for our 2025 Japan trip started way back in March of 2024 with a hotel reservation for eight nights in Tokyo. That hotel booking was quickly followed by a flight purchase to and from Tokyo's Haneda Airport just as soon as flights were available to bookend our hotel resy. Those two actions meant we'd be spending every night of this trip in one hotel in Tokyo. One hotel? For the whole trip? Yep, I know...it's rare for us. 

But one and only one hotel in Tokyo didn't necessarily mean we'd be spending every day in Tokyo. We wanted to explore a little beyond the city limits.

Our initial draft itinerary for this vacation had a few days with trips out of town. Mount Fuji. Nikko. And a walk in the woods somewhere north and west of the city to find some wasabi in the wild. But as we refined and refined the plan, gradually all those day trips fell away as we piled more and more Tokyo stuff onto our list. Eventually we were left with staying entirely in the city with just one-half day trip out to Yokohama, which we really considered to be part of Tokyo. I know it's not, but it sort of is in my mind.

Then at the last minute we decided our itinerary wasn't quite full enough and that we should stay true to our initial impulse and find somewhere a little bit further afield. For just one day. We picked Kawagoe, which we'd never heard of but which we found when paging through a borrowed Japan travel guide. The town (pronounced in Hopwood phonetics ka-WAH-go-eh) is about 90 minutes by subway and train from the hotel we had picked as our base of operations and seemed to have a few things that would hold our interest for a few hours.   

And so what's in Kawagoe? Well of course (and why would you expect anything different on this trip?) some temples and shrines (have to keep filling the goshuin-cho...) and some sakura. Let's face it, we weren't going anywhere on this vacation that wouldn't have a sakura or two or two dozen and we read that Kawagoe had a river towards the north end of town flanked by cherry blossoms on both sides. 

We also looked forward to a little shopping in an old part of the town that featured some historic warehouses (or kurazukuri) in a style of building that we likely wouldn't find too many other places in Japan. The kurazukuri date from a time in Japan's history when Kawagoe served as an important way station for goods all over the nation on their way to Tokyo. As commerce thrived, merchants from Kawagoe needed sturdy, fire-proof warehouses to store their valuable commodities so they built very expensive and very permanent buildings along the town's main street. These today are converted into various sorts of food and merch stores.

And in case you are wondering why I'm going shopping while on vacation, Japan is a Mecca of consumerism. They have the best stuff for sale there all over the place.

Kawagoe's Time Bell Tower. Keeping time and chiming since 1894.

And none of that was the biggest draw to Kawagoe for us. But let's not rush that. Let's spend a few paragraphs on the temples and shrines shall we? Or more accurately...one or two on one of each. Because we have to cover temples and shrines at least in a little detail. 

I wrote in an earlier post that we made an effort on this Japan vacation to curate our list of temples and shrines so we'd have something to remember each visit by. It's easier to remember a place with piles of daikon radishes all over the property than it is to remember a wooden temple or shrine hall with a wooden pagoda which you go see by walking under a wooden torii or two. And yes, pretty much all the temples and all the shrines in Japan are made out of wood.

If we had been hard-er core about temple and shrine visits on this vacation, we could easily have visited many more houses of worship in Kawagoe. But we figured two was enough when we found (1) a temple advertising 500 statues of buddhist monks and (2) a shrine that sold fortunes contained inside little red snappers that you have to fish for out of a bowl using a miniature fishing rod. That and a tunnel of ema, or prayer tablets, purchased and left at the shrine property so the prayers (I guess) have a higher probability of coming to pass. Assuming you believe that stuff.

The red snapper shrine (Hikawa Shrine) was worth a visit. We fished for (what is likely) a papier-mâché red snapper (it will now become a Christmas tree ornament, something it was NEVER intended to be), walked the tunnel of ema and made sure to check out Kawagoe's collection of sakura along the river (or was it more of a large stream?) just immediately to the north of the property.  We did not linger too long here. There's only so much fortune fishing you can do.

And no, we didn't feel the need to try to get one of each color of snapper (see below). Ours is the lighter color.

Hikawa shrine's basket of fish fortunes and tunnel of ema.

The temple was more memorable, although admittedly, we found nothing here to re-purpose as a Christmas tree ornament.

The temple we visited in Kawagoe is called Kita-in Temple. It was founded (it is believed) in the ninth century C.E. and like most good temples in Japan, it has burned down at least one or two times (I find references on line to fires that destroyed the place in 1202 and 1638). Remember the whole wood construction thing. Fire likes wood. Temples have burned a lot in Japan.

Sometime during the middle of the second millennium C.E., it became fashionable (and I'm probably overstating and dumbing down things here a little bit) for buddhist temples to acquire or commission a series of statues of Rakan, early disciples of the original Buddha who achieved full enlightenment and lived forever in a state of Nirvana. It started in the late 1600s in Tokyo and after that, other temples insisted on adding their own collection. Kita-in started working on theirs in the late 1700s and it likely took about 40 years to have them all carved.

They are pretty amazing. 

Find the sign on the temple property to the 500 Rakan; follow it loosely and imaginatively (it took us at least three attempts to find the statues); and you'll enter into a fenced enclosure holding row after row of robed figures in a variety of poses with a full range of facial expressions. Apparently no two are alike and I believe it. We didn't see any obvious duplication in our time checking out as many of the different figures and faces as we could. And I realize from the photograph above you can clearly see the temple's pagoda from the place where the statues site but I swear, it doesn't work the other way around. These things are concealed well.

While we didn't try too hard to check that there were no actual identical twins in the statuary, we  did spend some time finding a favorite or two and then leaving some yen in coin form next to some of our most beloved fellows. I picked a dude with a monkey on his lap (I know...always with the Year of the Monkey with me...) and the only figure I could find with a cup which of course I assumed held beer or wine or some other tasty beverage. He looked happy...what can I say? I'm thinking I could hang with that dude and try to get a little bit closer to enlightenment. Or something like that. I'd bring a cup too.

Oh...and apparently the sign is wrong. There are apparently 540 statues. We didn't count. Being in that space (and it was just the two of us), I felt remarkably connected spiritually to Japan and Buddhism. Sounds strange but it's true. There was a certain peacefulness to just moving between and around those figures. I'm sure the rain that kept everyone else away helped.

The Rakan with the monkey is in the bottom pic. See my earlier post for the dude with the cup.

But none of that was what made us visit Kawagoe. Don't get me wrong, that stuff all helped. But we picked Kawagoe because they are apparently renowned for their sweet potatoes. And Japanese sweet potatoes are certainly very special. Kawagoe is sweet potato town!

After we were done with visiting Kita-in and Hakawa and having seen the the town's famous wooden bell tower (yes, it burned down or was at least damaged by fire a few times) and the gorgeous kurazukuri warehouses, it was lunchtime. And there is all manner of sweet potato treats to be found in town if you look hard enough. Sweet potato fries. Sweet potato pudding. Sweet potato candy. Sweet potato noodles. Sweet potato with eel. Sweet potato ice cream. Sweet potato with chocolate. Yeah...we didn't have any of those things.

First bite? Sweet potato red bean paste buns. 

If you had told me 13 years ago before I started exploring places other than North America and Western Europe that I'd leap at the chance to eat some red bean paste and sweet potato enveloped by a soft and squishy and mostly tasteless rice dough called mochi, I would have said you were crazy. But that's what travel in general and Japan in particular has done to me. Red bean paste? Mochi? And sweet potato? And all freshly hot from the steamer? Yes, please.

So look...mochi red bean paste buns are a must have when you are in Japan. I don't mean a must have like durian in southeast Asia or Brennivin in Iceland kind of way. Not a rite of passage, I-can't-believe-you-just-consumed-that sort of thing. I mean these are genuinely sweet cravables. And add some thinly sliced sweet potato to add texture and extra sweetness. Good stuff! It disappeared quickly.

But what we really needed was a just plain roasted sweet potato. We found just that in one of the kurazukuri on the west side of the town's main street. Just sweet potato. No toppings. No gimmicks. No frills. No extra flavors. Just sweet potato. Roasted to perfection.

I don't know what it is about the sweet potatoes in Japan. I don't know if they just have better raw materials than we do here at home in the United States or what. But a simple roasted sweet potato eaten on the streets of some Japanese town or city is just mind-blowing. Ours were plucked out of the roaster, cut in half, dropped in a couple of pieces of custom-made cardboard and handed to us with a spoon in each half. The roast is so perfect that the flesh of the sweet potato separates from the skin with zero effort. And they are so rich and sugary that there is actual syrup to scoop out of the bottom of the skin. How on Earth do they do this?

What finishes off a good three mile or so walk complete with sweet potato lunch? Dessert, that's what. And I know what you are thinking...sweet potato ice cream? 

Naaaahhh. I already said we didn't have any of that. Dessert was sweet potato beer.

I will say that my past beer drinking experience in Japan has involved relatively straightforward, well-crafted and mild-tasting Japanese imitations of traditional German lager beer. And yes, the Japanese do it better somehow. So it was refreshing on this trip to have a glass or two of Japanese craft beer and there's no better place to get that in Kawagoe than at Coedo Brewery. They have a brewpub (or brew-restaurant is probably more accurate) near one of the two train stations in Kawagoe proper. 

This is not the first time I've had sweet potato beer (hello, Maui Brewing Company!) in my life. And to be clear here, this is probably beer that is brewed around or with sweet potatoes and not OF sweet potatoes. This one had body and thickness and taste and it was dark. What more could I want. Perfect end to the perfect (and only) day trip on our 2025 Japan trip. Kanpai!

Sweet potato beer (top). Kurazukuri (bottom).

There is one more and last thing I'll say about Kawagoe. 

Our walk from Kita-in to Hikawa took us down a ton of residential streets. Yes, you can get there by walking down the kurazukuri-lined street where we found our sweet potato treats but it's way out of the way. So we Google Maps-ed it and walked the shortest way we could down narrow streets and alleyways (some of the latter could have actually been some of the former). I swear I could have been walking through some small English town. I mean other than the obviously Japanese touches like the signs in kanji. 

It sounds crazy but I'll stick to my guns on this one. I think it was the tight streets; the tiny backed-in parked cars behind gates right on the street fronts; the overwhelming use of brick as a building material of choice; and the gardens. Especially the gardens. They all seemed to be super neatly kept and relied a ton on potted plants to add greenery, rather than flowers and other forms of greenery direct planted in the soil because, well, there's just not that much room for soil. Pots are more flexible.

How would I even make that connection? Well, I did live in England for 11 years and I still have family there and we have walked around the towns they live in a few times in the last dozen years or so. It's odd to say but the residential typology was remarkable similarly evocative. It was totally unexpected. 

I'm sure the rain helped. Rain always reminds me of England, especially when it's the type of rain that really makes you question if it's worth getting the umbrella out. We did.

So that's it. Kawagoe. Worth a train ride for a few hundred statues and some amazing, incredible, unctuous sweet potatoes. I don't know how they do it.

Last sakura picture on this blog from this trip. Kawagoe. Just north of Hikawa Shrine.

Goshuin-Cho Update

Warning: complaining coming.

For as long as I can remember in my life, I have been a collector. Football cards. Comic books. Stamps. Star Wars figures. Baseball cards. Coins. Records. CDs. Bobbleheads. Art. Autographs. Funko Pops. Funko Pop Incredible Hulks. I am sure I could go on and on and on and on.

A lot of my collections are long since abandoned (NOT, I should note, the Funko Pop Incredible Hulks) but in 2017, I picked up the start of a new collection: Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. This collection started on the slopes of Mount Fuji in May 2017 and continued as recently as this past April in Tokyo. While my collection of Japanese temples and shrines is very much experience and memory based (since I'm not ACTUALLY acquiring the actual properties), there is a physical manifestation to this collection: the goshuin.

Goshuin are temple seals, stamped images which are then personalized with calligraphy by the monks resident at the property you are visiting. A collection of goshuin is traditionally kept in a goshuin-cho, or temple seal book, which opens accordian-style to record your memories. Or I guess to allow others to record your memories would be more technically correct. Fill your goshuin-cho with a series of stamped and written souvenirs and you create a keepsake which is likely unique in this world. It really records your personal journey throughout Japan.

Since we had a few temple and shrine visits on our agenda for this trip, we brought the goshuin-cho we purchased at the Komitake Shrine on Mount Fuji all those years ago to get that volume a bit closer to being filled up.

But this year, collecting goshuin did not go as planned. We found a few things that were different.

What we had found at every temple and shrine we visited before this year was that you got a goshuin in exchange for about 300 yen. Sometimes we had to wait if the property was mobbed with people but that wasn't really a big deal. We'd just drop off our goshuin-cho as soon as we got to the temple or shrine and pick it up 20 minutes or so later.

The first temple we visited on this trip was Gotōkuji Temple west of the city, a veritable celebration of the waving cat (or maneki-neko) that populates Japanese and other sorts of Asian restaurants all over the United States and I'm sure the world. We found the temple shop, entered, inquired about a goshuin, handed over 300 yen and got a pre-stamped, pre-calligraphed (is that actually a word?) sheet of paper just a bit smaller than our goshuin-cho handed back to us.

What is this? A pre-printed sheet of paper? That's not what we wanted. What are we supposed to do with this? Glue it in the book? Really? Is this a cutback on labor? Are the monks who write out the goshuin out to lunch or just not working that day? It was pretty confusing. And no, we didn't pepper the dude behind the counter with all these questions. He didn't seem super engaged. 

This was shocking. And it was not the last time it happened. We purchased another pre-printed sheet at Kita-in Temple in Kawagoe and found no handwritten-on-the-spot option at Hikawa Shrine (also in Kawagoe) or at the cemetery of the 47 rōnin at Sengaku-ji. We stopped buying after Kita-in. Couldn't come to terms with whole thing, especially after discovering the second piece of paper we were handed in exchange for our yen was larger than our goshuin-cho. Disaster. What are we supposed to do with a piece of paper bigger than the actual book that it goes in?

Now admittedly, this did not happen at every temple and shrine we visited. We did get some actual goshuin written and stamped in our goshuin-cho. And because I've been recording in this blog which goshuin came from which site, I am doing the same thing here. The three pictures below record the filling of one side (minus one page) of our Komitake Shrine goshuin-cho. As usual and because it's Japan, I'm listing the goshuin right to left.

Sensō-ju Temple, Tokyo (right) from 2024; Gotōkuji Temple (preprinted), Tokyo (left).

Meiji Jingu Shrine, Tokyo (right); Fukagawa Fudō-dō, Tokyo (left).

Kita-in Temple (preprinted), Kawagoe (right); Matsuchiyama Shoden Temple, Tokyo (left).

I love the green stamp on the goshuin from Fukagawa Fudō-dō by the way. This is our second goshuin with different colored stamps (after Tomioka Hachiman last year). I'm also a little disappointed that the Matsuchiyama Shoden goshuin doesn't have a big old radish in it but I'm probably projecting 21st century western sensibilities there.

After our visit to Matsuchiyama Shoden, we were left with one blank page in our original goshuin-cho and we had just one more temple left on this trip: Sengaku-ji. Since the story associated with Sengaku-ji was so powerful for me (read about it here), we decided to go ahead and retire our Komitake Shrine goshuin-cho and buy a new one with an image pertinent to Sengaku-ji on the cover. Is this just blatant consumerism? Maybe. We wanted a new book and the right one was available. It's the book with the green paper sleeve in the cover picture of this post and immediately below.

And yes, I know that means we have a book with one page on one side of the book blank and had the whole other side entirely empty. Deal with it. We are.

Our new goshuin-cho is gorgeous. The front and back cover are yellow-gold in color and the front features what I can only assume are 36 of the 47 rōnin that avenged Lord Asano Naganori's death a little more than 300 or so years ago. It is different than the first goshuin-cho that we bought way back in 2017: the cover is paper (and not cloth) and the book is a little larger (which may explain why the pre-prepared goshuin we picked up in Kawagoe is bigger than the only goshuin-cho we owned at that time.

I mentioned earlier in this post that there were no on-the-spot goshuin available at the cemetery at Sengaku-ji but we still got our goshuin from our visit because there are actually two available at this temple. Although I will admit, I am disappointed that I couldn't get a temple seal from the very spot that the 36 rōnin (I guess 47 wouldn't fit?) on the cover are resting forever.

The goshuin that the monk who sold us our new goshuin-cho added to our new book was very different in one respect from all the other goshuin we have collected: it was free.

So that previous statement isn't exactly true. It's true that we didn't pay cash or credit for our goshuin at Sengaku-ji. But it wasn't completely free. It required the copying of a sutra or a piece of scripture by me while we were on property. And it's all in Japanese.

This could have been challenging. I mean I've never written in kanji before so I imagined my effort would be very, very sloppy as I copied a few dozen or more Japanese characters using a calligraphy pen from an example sheet to a brand new piece of paper.

They didn't make me do that. I was directed a series of drawers which contained different sutras, all printed on the back side of what looked to me like a sheet of vellum. I was simply required to trace over the letters with my pen. I am sure my attempt was less than perfect but it looks pretty impressive in the photograph above. I'm sure I flagged at the end and got a little sloppy. There are a lot of characters to copy.

It got me the goshuin below, the first entry in our brand new goshuin-cho which is now ready for more filling. When are we headed back to Japan again?