Author: himawari

Remember that One Piece promotion? C’mon, it was like three posts back. Anyway, the promotion is already over. It lasted less than a week. We got 5/9 posters. Because back home, promotions last longer than 5 days. We figured we had time.

We haven’t given up hope yet about finding the rest of the wanted posters, but the prospects are rather dim. Fortunately, we nabbed all the posters we really liked. The rest were simply for completeness.

In that similar vein, McDonalds is running a promotion featuring American Burgers. They have a burger named for every state and each burger gets one week. That’s it. Then it’s gone. They’ve already gone through Texas and New York while we were here, and they are halfway through Hawaii now. It’s insane!

We zipped out to Nagoya in the Mie prefecture, with the intent of spending considerable time in that region. The city featured a few interesting buildings and lots of traffic, but we didn’t feel any particular charm.

Our plan was to crash for a night in Nagoya, then head up to Gero Onsen for a relaxing night or two. We booked into the Dormy Inn Nagoya, which was decidedly less impressive than Dormy Inn Otaru. But it is conveniently located near the Nagoya red light district, if that’s your thing.

That’s three new hotels we’ve visited on Honshu, and two red light districts. We’re on a roll.

Deciding to make the best of our time in Nagoya, we checked out the Nagoya science center. It was two buildings and a planetarium. Admission was $6 each, including our tickets to the planetarium show. Eat your heart out Science World. The annual pass ran $20.

So you would be fair in assuming that the Nagoya science world was pretty lame. Except you would be wrong. It was pretty darn awesome. I mean, everything was in Japanese, so it was pretty tough to understand some of the exhibits. But most of the things were interactive, and Jenn and I had lots of fun figuring out the rules of the games. Maybe a little more than we enjoyed the games themselves. And let’s be honest here: zapping things with electricity is fun in any language.

We also checked out the planetarium show. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a similar script to the quickie 20 minute shows we get back home at our planetarium. Instead, we were treated to a 60 minute presenation on the cosmos, and a 10 minute intro on the NEW planetarium they are currently constructing, which will be a self-enclosed globe suspended between two buildings. It looks very cool.

The cosmos presentation was also pretty incredible, since I learned more about the constellations in a foreign language I could barely follow than I ever did back home. Which leads me to my current hypothesis: the Japanese are really sophisticated robots diguised as humans.

But I digress.

The second stage of our plan was Gero onsen. Unfortunately, after carefully navigating the Japanese language page of the onsen we wanted to stay at, it appeared they were not accepting reseverations anymore. At all. Ever. I’m uncertain if it was a glitch on the website, or if they were remodeling, or if they had gone out of business, but it was clear fate was not on our side.

It was about this time that we realized Nagoya wasn’t really a city for us. We looked at the itinerary of things to do and see and decided we wanted to go elsewhere.

The next day we headed south for Ise, to visit the Umbrella Shrine. The shrine itself is one of the most sacred Shinto shrines in Japan: so sacred, in fact, the priests knock the shrine down every twenty years and build it again a few paces over. When you visit, you don’t actually get to see the shrine, either, because it is that sacred. Instead, you get to view the sort of outer gate bits. And a sea of umbrellas as people wait their turn in the queue.

After the Ise Shrine, the drizzle became genuine rain as we searched for Samurai town. Several misadventures later, we realized that Mie was not for us and we left.

Almost every restaurant we’ve visited has had awesome jazz music playing in the background. All the classic standards.

The exception was the Dormy Inn in Otaru which had quiet string fugues playing in the hallways and – I kid you not – a room dedictated to the Bachs. The Bach Room was a small corner room with an ample supply of reading material, comfortable chairs, and 24/7 music by all the most famous Bachs.

If our vacation were a movie, it’s had a pretty fantastic soundtrack so far.

After three flights in five days, we paused in Osaka for some R&R. We hit up the same Hearton hotel we stayed at during our first trip, in the same semi-double rooms, and it felt a little like coming home.

Our ambitions for sightseeing in Osaka were minimal during our two night stay, and we succeeded admirably. We did take one morning to hit up Osaka castle and the surrounding park. The park was simply amazing.

There were plenty of foot paths through out the park. And, being it was a Sunday, there were lots of people out enjoying the fine weather. Did I mention the fine weather? After Hokkaido, it was positively summer-like. Clear blue skies, and a warm 10 to 15 degrees most of the day. And cute, fluffy little white clouds dancing in the sky.

We sauntered around the park for some time, enjoying the warm sun, before we decided to tour the castle museum. The castle itself is not original. Most of the feudal castles in Japan were torn down during the Meiji restoration, when a “One Castle, One Province” rule was put into effect. But the replica castle had a lot nicer amenities inside, and the space was put to good use as a museum. Not much to see if you aren’t into history, but all of the exhibits were in Japanese and English, making it a museum the two of us could appreciate more.

After the castle museum, we toured the plum blossom orchard. A few trees were starting to come into colour, but most were still bare. It is a little early yet. We are visiting another plum grove in Kyoto late next week, and hopefully the extra time will give the trees a chance to fully bloom.

It was pretty good. Very impressive skills, coupled with impressive quantities of snow. Very cold. And crowded. The chocolate covered bananas on a stick the food vendors were selling looked interesting.

Yeah. That basically covers it.

We left Kiroro in the morning and headed back to Otaru, whereupon we caught a train to Sapporo, switched trains in Sapporo and headed north to Asahikawa, where we had to stop for further directions because I forgot the name of our destination.

What was our purpose in traveling three hours to an out of the way city in Northern Hokkadio in blizzard like conditions? A sake brewery, of course.

But not just any brewery. The sake they make is not available for sale outside of Japan. And they brew the sake in traditional ice houses, in small batches, with an emphasis on quality over quantity. In American terms, we were hunting for a micro-brewery.

Fortunately, the local tourist information office had maps of the area in English. And at the very edge of the map corner was our target: the Taka…something brewery. Okay, I’ve already forgotten the name again. Japanese is hard, okay?

The snow was falling heavily as we braved the icy streets of Asahikawa. The sidewalks were actually an accumulation of compacted snow, many inches thick; we figured we were walking almost a full foot above the proper ground.

After about twenty minutes on foot, we reached a building that could only be the sake brewery. It was a traditional wooden structure, with thick, traditional wooden doors barring entry.

It was closed.

So with heavy hearts and a sadness in our souls we turned around and..no, I’m just kidding. It was open. The real entrance was around the side.

The floor creaked as we walked inside and admired the rows and rows of bottles. All of this sake had been painstaking crafted. Some had been more painstakingly crafted than others, but we couldn’t tell. I couldn’t read a damn thing.

The nice shop lady came to our rescue. She didn’t speak much English, but she knew the only words we needed to hear: ‘tasting okay?’

Oh, hell YES! A dozen very generous pours later, we returned to the Asahikawa train station, warm in spite of the weather and weighed down with several bottles of extremely delicious sake. The two most expensive bottles will make the return trip with us to Canada, to share with our friends. The other bottles…will not be so fortunate.

Delicious sake soon to be consumed, we salute you!

We found your snow. It was in Hokkaido. Evidentally, it had been drinking heavily; it certainly kept falling down the entire time we were there.

Ha ha. Ha.

But seriously, folks. We left the comfort of the Dormy Inn and caught a bus to Hotel Piano at Kiroro resort. We arrived mid-morning, too early for check-in. Instead we stuffed our bags in lockers, rented snow equipment, and went skiing. My wife is a wicked awesome ski demon. Zoom zoom! Away she went. I ran into a sign.

It was a good thing, really. The sign was the only thing I could find to prevent me from entering the speed mogul ramp. That would have ended very, very badly. Jenn did the moguls later, just to prove she is more awesome than me.

After a few runs, they closed down the course we had been skiing and opened up the night runs. We decided we’d had our fun and went back to the hotel.

Remember when I said food was cheap in Japan? If you don’t, you should go back and read the old blog posts. You obviously weren’t paying attention the first time. It turns out, you can find an expensive restaurant if you look really, really hard at the top of a remote mountain. And it’s french cuisine.

Our table was on a balcony that overlooked the hotel lobby. Below us a grand piano had been retro-fitted into a player piano and we dined to the sound of jazz piano classics. The meals themselves were a set course: you could chose big, bigger, or biggest, and you could choose your drink. (We opted for gin and tonics).

The amuse bouche was a light carrot mousse. This was followed by seven courses, each artfully arranged upon our plates. Each course was small, and very delicious. The entire meal was choreographed over 90 minutes, and involved a supporting cast of 11 different utensils, and equal number of plates, one very attentive waiter and two very satisfied Canadians.

And, yeah. We forgot our cameras in the room so no pictures.

Otaru was a lovely city. The highlight of the town is the Otaru canal district, which features several old buildings. The city has worked hard to maintain the historic ambience of the port. A very nice stroll, though not a long one.

To make up for that fact, we did the stroll about six times. Because we were not looking for the canal district. We had come to Otaru with a purpose. We were looking for a long lost cousin.

Ages ago, Vancouver sent a steamclock to Otaru as a gift. It is an exact duplicate of the steamclock located on Granville street, except that it is slightly larger in all dimensions, and it actually functions as a steamclock.

The steamclock is located in front of an orgel music box shop, at the very end of a picturesque boulevard. We probably would have appreciated the boulevard more, except it was -10 C. and we’d been walking for a very long time. We went inside the orgel shop to warm up.

The shop itself was an old brick and frame warehouse building, about three stories tall. The entire interior was one large room. And everywhere you looked were music boxes. We stayed for about a half hour, admiring the quality of the workmanship – both of the music boxes and the building itself. Eventually, we’d warmed enough to brave the trek back.

One Piece is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It is a cartoon about a boy who sails off to sea to become the Pirate King and beats up a lot of people along the way. It’s practically Shakespearean, except nobody dies.

Lawsons – the 24 hour convenient store and my primary vendor of Pocky – is sponsoring a One Piece celebration. The store has printed up awesome quality images of the One Piece crew’s wanted posters. Eight in all.

After some back and forth, we established that they do not sell the posters. You get a poster free, if you buy a Bunch of specially marked items in store. After even more back and forth, we established the magic number at Two.

We have so far collected two posters. And by the Power of Greyskull, we shall collect them all!

Every good story needs a montage. It’s the bit where you fast-forward to here, from there. Here is currently Otaru, Hokkaido. And it involves a great deal of luxury. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

We flew JAL for this trip. The flight was nice and wholly uneventful. Air Canada did several things better, however. For starters, we travel light. One carry-on each. Air Canada lets you check in via the website and print your own boarding pass from home. Brilliant.

Secondly, Air Canada has movies on demand. Trust me, it’s better.

Thirdly (and admittedly this is Tokyo’s fault) immigration came before baggage. In Osaka, we jumped queue by not waiting at the baggage. Essentially we walked off the plane, right past the baggage turns, and straight up to two very confused immigration and customs officials. Not so in Tokyo. We got to stand in line again.

On a positive note, nobody moves a line more efficiently than the japanese. And an extra bonus: neither Jenn nor I were accosted by stern looking customs agents with white plastic gloves.

Our first two nights were booked at the Hotel Sky Court. The hotel was pretty nice – spacious for a Japanese semi-double and a very reasonable price. It just happened to be in the red light district. We were a little uncertain of the directions, but a very nice pimp gave us two umbrellas and confirmed the directions, and we reached the hotel without incident.

The next day we visited Kamakura, an hour south of Tokyo. The train ride was pleasant, the weather cloudy but dry. We explored the town with a great deal of inefficiency and photography. Viewed several temples, shrines, shops, and the second largest (second best?) Buddha in Japan. In fact, second-best sums Kamakura up rather well.

On the way back to the hotel, zagged and zigged and stopped in at Anato No Warehouse; a five story arcade building built to resemble a run-down Chinatown neighbourhood. The walls were brick, the floors concrete, the vending machines rusted. Everything had a dingy, dirty appeal to it. Except the ladies bathrooms, which were done in high Parisian style apparently. That’s understanding your demographics. The first floor was the entry, floors 2-3 were arcade and prize games, interspersed with darts and pool tables. We snapped pictures like crazy gaijin until on the fourth floor one of the staff finally had the nerve to tell us pictures weren’t allowed.

At the top was an internet cafe. We tried to use the internet, but apparently we needed a card. We asked for a card, and were told we needed a card. Evidently, something was lost in translation. That something was our internet, we returned to the hotel in defeat.

Which brings us to today, when we woke early and boarded another train, took another plane, to yet another train. And thus we reached the Dormy Inn.

Okay, silly name. But the hotel is literally 100 feet from the JR rail station. The room is excellent (and has complimentary internet), but it is the baths that seal the deal.

The men’s bath had three indoor pools (ranging from ice cold to lobster bisque), a sauna, and two outdoor baths. Nothing beats soaking in scalding water when the ambient temperature is -12 degrees Celsius. And after all the walking and traveling we’ve done the past few days, it was nice to scurry into the hot baths to soak for a few hours.