coffee and ivy

08.03.30-Detritus-Kameyama-4, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

The signboard of a ivy covered coffee shop in Kameyama city, Mie pref.

Early Morning-Late Night Shake-up

I'm use to earthquakes. I grew up with them in California. The one this morning at 1:00 AM or so was only 1-2 in my area, but it still shook me up. Maybe because I was half asleep, and maybe because I just watched this on Youtube.

Broken Vending Machines

08.03.30-Detritus-Kameyama-1, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

A tobacco vending machine, hastily painted over an unknown number of years ago, sits in front of the house that most likely use to maintain it. When does the the cost of disposal out weigh the visual cost on the landscape? This question assumes that an old, broken, sun bleached vending machine is a negative upon the landscape as a whole. What positives could this vending machine offer to the landscape? What cultural norms effect your viewing of this vending machine as neutral, positive or negative?

Kenrokuen 兼六園

Kenrokuen is Kanazawa city’s biggest tourist attraction and rightly so. The garden truly put me into a trance. If the rain hadn’t startled me from that trance I might still be there wandering around the garden. That rain did however cast the garden in soft light that made it practically glow. Great for taking photos, but not to great for cameras. Besides the garden it was wonderful seeing so many foreign tourists walking around the park. While Japan continues to amaze me, I’ve become accustomed to living here over the last 3 years. I no longer have that sense of awe and wonder that comes from being in a new country and not understanding the language. Seeing the tourists made me a little jealous of their experience. Going there on your first trip to Japan must be even more mind blowing than my experience.

Eki-ben and other eats.

For spring break I took a Seshun18kippu trip making a loop from Sanda->Osaka->Nara->Kameyama->Nagoya->Gifu->Takayama->Toyama->Kanazawa->Osaka->Sanda. I'm going to feature some of the photos and things I did over that trip over the next week.

Ekiben


At Minoota station I changed trains and bought this ekiben (train station lunch box) from a man on the platform for ¥950. I'm not the biggest mushroom fan but this bento was great. I love bamboo shoots and the pickle was made from persimmion I believe. The grandpa I bought it from kept asking me "Rice, OK?" using the Japanese/English word "raisu" instead of gohan. I was trying to ask him what was in the bowl when he questioned me about my stomachs ability to handle foreign starches, but I gave up told him, "Of course, I can eat rice." Every once and a while where you get the can you eat rice question. Some people get mad at this stuff. I feel he was looking out for me. What if I really couldn't eat the bento? Now of course the reason for his concern was completely wrong, but I didn't have the time or the need to correct him. In the end I got a good bento and a wonderful seat on the train for the trip up the mountain to Takayama.



Best Ekiben. Ever. Miso. Takenoko (bamboo shoots). Mushrooms. Beef. Sweet Plum. Tofu. All in a self heating box. Oh, and micro-brew beer to go with it. Could anything be better. Yes! As I ate it I had a whole booth for me. Four seats. Could it get better than that? Yes! The view as I ate this bento was absurdly beautiful. Deep blue water. Snow still on the ground. Amazing. I found this one at Takayama station.


Toyama is famous for this type of pushed, compressed, sushi. It is thought to be the predecessor to the sushi we commonly think of. I've had a different version in Nara where they have thumb sized pieces wrapped in the leaves of a persimmon tree. This was also quite good and the package was made from real wood and bamboo! I got the salmon version but they had others. This wasn't the best ekiben I've ever had, but quite good none-the-less. I got this one at Toyama station, but I saw it at Kanazawa station also.


The last ekiben of my trip was this duck sushi. This one was pretty good. I wish I didn't put all of the sweet sauce on the top, it turned out to be too strong.

Ekiben is one of the best reasons to travel by train. It's not hard to find them, but if you can't find them it doesn't hurt to ask. Ekiben ga arimasuka? Some stations don't have them. Gifu station for example doesn't have an ekiben. They are sold in the station on both sides of the turnstiles normally. Prices range from ¥500 to ¥1,500.

Other food.


I had misokatsu in Nagoya Station. Very good

I had kaisendonburi (seafood rice bowl) in Kanazawa.

Maccha green tea with manjyu in Kenrokuen, Kanazawa.

For children, height is very important

20080310-Objects-01, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

Toys for sale at an omiyage (souvenir) shop on a small road leading up to Fushimi Inari Taisha. Omiyage shops often put these toys outside at kid level. Rarely do the toys have any relation to the local tourist attraction unlike the towels, pens, key chains, and other local goods that are on sale. These toys are merely to draw in the kids and hence their parents to the shop.

Habanero Bath

HabaneroBath-1, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

I saw this in the store and had to buy it. It's from the Tohato snack food company that uses the same habanero imagery to sell it's hot snacks and drinks. This is a packet of bathsalts. You pour a bath add the contents of this packet to give your soak a spicy twist. If you've seen my other blog you know I like baths, and I've used various bathsalts like these at home before. (The bath bombs from Lush are the best.)

So I guess your wondering what a habanero bath would be like; well it did sting in a good way when I first got in and it smelt and looked more orange that habanero. Two hours after my bath my skin is very smooth and comfortable and my legs feel interestingly hot. It could be that I poured my bath hotter than usual or it could be the salts, to tell you the truth I'm not too sure. The best part of the whole experience is that "do not eat" warning on the bottom left of the package.

Fushimi Inari Taisha 伏見稲荷大社

Photos of Fushimi Inari Taisha. Located two stations south of Kyoto station on the Nara line, this large shrine complex is known for its multitude of torii. Donors to the shrine put up a torii in their name in various sizes from about the size of a magazine to pretty huge. I took these photos using my Lensbaby 3g selective focus lens.

Homepage (in Japanese) 伏見稲荷大社

Kyoto's Cloud City

20080310-KyotoTower-02, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

Built in 1964 at a height of 131m the very retro, often disparaged Kyoto tower has always been an icon of an aesthetic of Japanese design that doesn't get much play in the west or Japan. It seems that all the major cities of Japan need a tower of some sort and all them feature prominently in their town's iconography but Kyoto tower, even-though it's most likely the first thing you'd notice leaving Kyoto station, is almost ignored from the cities self identification. During my study abroad days none of my teachers or fellow students liked it either. I guess I'm in the minority on this issue. No matter. It reminds me of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back and the idea that Lando is up there totally just makes it seem cooler to me.

-Kyoto Tower is located across the street from the main exit of JR Kyoto Station.
-The trip to the top costs ¥770
-Open all year
-Operating Hours are 9:00-21:00

The building underneath the tower has a hotel, bathhouse(!?!?), restaurants, cafes, omiyage shops. I actually haven't made my way to the top of the tower yet, so I'll have to go up, check out the bathhouse and report back about all that at Kansai Onsen Review.

Kyoto Tower homepage (in Japanese)
kyoto-tower.co.jp/kyototower/index.html

Sanda at Night

20080221-NighttimeSanda-02, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

Before moving to digital I use to take most of my photos at night. Thanks to a full moon last week, and the chance to borrow a tripod, I headed out to take some photos. The full set is here.

Discarded Bike Locks in Umeda

20080218-DiscardedBikeLocks, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

A common sight in most American cities, left over bike locks are not so common in Japan. Most people don't need to lock their bikes to something due to rarity of bike theft, or they can't do to the lack of anything to lock their bikes to. In downtown Osaka (Umeda) however, locking your bike to something would be a good idea--if you can find a place to lock your bike!

The Death and Life of Japanese Railways

Station sign-Miki Railway, Miki Station

At the end of March the Miki Railway will cease to exist. The small single track, single car, 6.6km long, 9 station rail line connects the Miki city center to the JR Kakogawa line. In 1985 the Miki line broke off from the national JR network during its reorganization and formed into a new thrid-sector (not for profit) company with ties to the city administration. It will be the fifth of these third-sector rail lines to close since the reorganization.

Boy Standing in the door of a Miki Railway train

I have some possible hypothesis for this closure. Is it the aftermath of an overbuilt national infrastructure that cannot support itself? Was this the eventual outcome for the line, but delayed by making it non-profit to lessen public outcry? Is this line just geographically un-profitable? I believe these three factors all played a major role in the railway’s decline. The pressure from the for-profit and much more efficient--albeit quite expensive--Kobe Electric Railway (Shintetsu) also helped exacerbated the situation. (Shintetsu runs more directly towards Kobe and Osaka, the largest local population centers and most likely the direction most residents of Miki would be traveling. The Miki Railway travels away from Kobe then connects to the less frequently run JR Kakogawa line. A quick example search of timetables on hyperdia shows that a route using Shintetsu from their Miki station to Sannomiya (downtown Kobe) would take about and hour and cost 720 yen. The same route using Miki Railway would take about an hour and a half and cost 1070 yen.)

Children taking photos of the a Miki Railway train coming into Yakujin Station

Another aspect of the closure has been the increase of tourism by families, train fanatics, and other curious people. While I was aware of the line, its immediate closure lead me to ride it last monday, a national holiday. The train was packed. At every station there was at least two people, sitting by their cars most of the time, taking photos of the train as it pulled up to the rickety wooden platforms that served as the stations. (Miki Railway runs like much of JR’s rural one-man routes with passengers paying the driver as they exit much like a bus.) In the train I was squished up against the front middle window next to the drivers booth, a prime photo spot. Around me there were a handful of middle aged men and one woman with various high-end SLR cameras. These were the densha otaku--train nerds. Then there were the less hardcore nerds and families using normal point and shoot cameras or their cell phones to capture the moment.

But a moment of what?

"Sayonara Miki Railway"

I am a moderate train nerd. I love riding the trains, but I’m definitely not as obsessive as some people. I came to ride this line before it closed. But I realized at that moment as I was couched down and staring out the dirty, fingerprinted window (how can you take a good shot through that), that I was there with a car full of people documenting the death of something. We were riding a dying horse to its stable for the last time. The grandfatherly figure driving the train didn’t seem at all overtly fazed by all these people, but there was a sense of sadness about him. All these people, and it will probably like this until the last day, coming to document his loss of a job--and quite likely an entire lifestyle too. I wondered if he was angry at us, if he thought that we could have saved his train if we just supported it before it was slated for closure. Of course I don’t know the answer to this. The train driver, and every other employee of the Miki Railway were all very, very busy so I didn’t have the chance to ask. You see at the main Miki station, the only station on the line with a staff, there were commemorative stamps and goods for sale. I bought a keychain, but there were phone straps, books, DVDs, toy trains, and rice crackers for sale--many of them sold out. The staff all looked as tired as the weather worn wooden building they were in.

Miki city

I came to Miki to ride the Miki Railway, I thought it would be a fun experience, but I left with a strange sense of sorrow. Humans revel in watching the despair of others. Is failure more attractive than success? Wether the death of the Miki Railway was predetermined by geographic or economic factors or not the clamor over that death shows that the failure might have an edge.

Hojo Railway train

But there is a bright side of this story. I also took this chance to ride the Hojo Railway. Similar in style and history to the Miki Railway, the Hojo Railway was bright and shining. The stations had the same rickety wooden construction, but appeared to be well maintained. Many flowers and other plants were planted in and around the stations. Signs, seemingly painted by local school children, advertised Kasai city as a “city of flowers.” The riders were upbeat and posters in the train celebrated the high ridership of the local train lines--oddly enough including the Miki Railway--and telling them that the more they used them the lines the more convenient they would become.

On the way home drinking cup-sake as the picturesque landscape of the sun setting on rural Japan slowly rolled by, the sadness I felt earlier had all but left me. The knowledge that community based not for profit mass transit can work made me happy. This time I wasn’t documenting demise, but instead celebrating life.

Link to my route on Google Maps.

Link to the set of photos I took on this trip on flickr.

Nigori Sake

IMG_0333, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

Nigori Sake is unfiltered Japanese rice wine so it takes a cloudy milky appearance. The flavor is quite hard to describe, yeasty, quite strange. Sometimes it can be overpowering to the point of not being able to drink it, but this bottle was wonderful. The stuff that makes this cloudy is filtered out for most varieties of Japanese rice wine and is used in cooking. It can be found in any supermarket in Japan.

Discarded Umbrella

Discarded Umbrella, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

An umbrella, it's handle broken, sits discarded in front of a train station collecting snow on a cold Kobe night.

Birthday Dinner

sushi 001, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

Having a birthday near setsubun is lucky as everyone is in the mood to eat maki sushi.

Propaganda Chips

Chips bought at Incheon Int'l Airport, Korea. Do these chips have a picture of the Liancourt Rocks / Dokdo / Takejima on them? Mildly unbelievable. Bringing international disputes to the public on this populist manner reminds me of the stupidity of "Freedom Fries" during the buildup to the Iraq War. Arguments are made black and white and pushed onto the young because the vagaries of the gray area are harmful to the group publishing such propaganda.

No good can come from an international dispute that's fought on a battlefield of video games and potato chips. Well some good can come from it, those chips were pretty tasty.

SNOW!

IMG_4930, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

It's cold. There's snow. That's it.

More snow.

harry jr?

IMG_4914, originally uploaded by sleepytako.

What is it? What does it do? My coworkers call it a sea urchin. I wasn't that sure when I got it. I use it to hold my keys, cell phone, lip stuff, and coin purse, but I often come into work in the morning to find strange objects embedded in its hairs. Dolls, stamps, toys, other things...

A wonderful Christmas gift. Thanks Mom!