For our last day in Sapporo, we decided to stick close for breakfast and have pancakes in a restaurant below our hotel.  (“Below” in this case means that the front desk for our hotel was on the 5th floor, and the restaurant was at street level.)

While waiting for our food to arrive, we watched a number of confused patrons ask directions to the bathroom, all of whom were directed here:

Can you spot the bathroom door in this picture?  If you zoom in, you’ll see the shelf is a bit worn below the flour bin – you push there to move the bookshelf aside to access the washroom.  Which is pretty cool.

What else is cool is that since we were last in Japan, the message seems to have been received that 外国人 such as ourselves would prefer to have pancakes available for breakfast, and not just as an afternoon snack.  As such, unlike our last visit, we were able to get supper fluffy soufflé pancakes for the first meal of the day. So we did.

Since this WAS our last day, we had to check out of our room and take our suitcases to a coin locker in the train station until it was time to catch our bus at 1:40. Fortunately, we travel pretty light – neither of us checked a bag at all during the trip except for the flight home, so our total encumbrance was two carry on-sized bags and two backpacks.

Baggage stowed, we went to see what else there was to see, and found a cool museum in the “Red Brick Building” a former government office.  It had a lot of neat exhibits about the various cities in Hokkaido, the history of the province, Japan’s ongoing argument with Russia about who owns the four islands between Hokkaido and the Kurils, (spoiler, Japan thinks they do and Russia thinks they do) and other historical stuff.

None of which we were allowed to photograph, so we didn’t.

In particular, there was a really interesting display about the indigenous Ainu culture on the island, which did a really quease-inducing job of tapdancing around the way they’ve been treated over time by the government.  Eerily reminiscent of similar whitewashing attempts in, oh, I don’t know – the US. And Canada.

Ergh.

It was raining, so we wandered back down into the underground mall to look for lunch.  We took a number at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, and then realized that number was 82. Now serving? 36.

We spent an anxious hour watching the clock tick forward to the time we absolutely, positively, COULD NOT wait any longer to catch our bus while the “now serving” number clicked agonizingly slowly upwards.  We were finally seated at 1:05, with our bus departure at 1:40.  The only thing that saved us was the fact that while Leigh stayed in line, I had gone and grabbed our bags from the lockers.

And then we just shoved sushi into our faces WAY too fast to properly enjoy it.  Pity – it was damn good sushi.

We made it to our bus stop just as the bus was pulling up, and were unceremoniously hurled on board to make our trip.

Where were we going?  Noboribetsu, a small onsen (hot spring) town, full of ryokan (traditional inns), kanketsusen (geysers), and combini. (convenience stores)

To be fair, everywhere in Japan is full of combini.

The road up the hill from the main highway to Noboribetsu features this imposing apparition:

The text directly under him says “welcome,” but…

On arriving at our ryokan, we checked in, were issued our yukata, and then went for a walk to check out the town.  We opted NOT to do so in the yukata.

Which WAS an interesting decision to make.  After all – these onsen are inns for tourists.  Primarily Japanese tourists, but tourists nonetheless, and we WERE tourists. And we saw lots of hotel guests who WERE walking the streets in yukata.  So I think it’s a difficult line to locate in terms of being appropriative vs. respectful.

What WASN’T difficult to determine was that it was way too hot for long sleeves.  We wore the yukata to dinner, hopefully that’s good enough.

We found this square with painted clubs to represent the different demons that populate the valley.

And soon it was time to return to our hotel for dinner. One of the things a traditional ryokan stay is know for is a multicourse kaiseki meal.  These meals always contain certain types of courses in a set order – appetizers, steamed dishes, grilled dishes, etc. Also, while you’re stuffing yourself, they have time to sneak into your room and lay out the futons.

The ryokan meal we had last time we were in Japan was a real highlight, and this one did NOT disappoint.

There was also dessert, but we had to forget to photograph SOMETHING, didn’t we?

After dinner, we went back out again to see what the town was like at night, and I’m glad we did, because the geyser in the square we visited earlier was now erupting.  Under the bridge someone had built over it, because that can’t possibly cause a problem, right?

It was too dark to get a good picture of the geyser itself, but even that wouldn’t convey the most interesting thing which was the NOISE.  Apparently every three hours this thing makes a noise like putting a load of bowling balls in a cement mixer.  Wild.

Since we can’t easily post our OWN video, here’s a link to someone else’s.

And with that, it was time for futon.

Day 2 dawned somewhat grey, but we had a few sights we wanted to see in Sapporo.  It turns out that a number of the things I had marked on my “possible” list were a long way out of town, but there was definitely interesting stuff nearby.  We started out at Mermaid coffee for a delicious cheese toast and pourover.

Which we didn’t photograph.  But the coffee was so good even Leigh liked it – looks like I can only find coffee to her taste in Asia. (Despite the fact that the beans in this case were from El Salvador.)

After breakfast we hopped on the subway.  We still had our IC cards left over from our previous trip, and they worked flawlessly after we put some more money on them at a 7-11.  I can’t stress enough how painless these cards make most local transit in Japan. You can install an app tap them to your phone to check the balance. (If you have an iPhone, you can even just put them on your phone and tap that on the bus, but we’re Android folks.)

At any rate, we were off to Hokkaido shrine, which is very deliberately designed to evoke a Samurai helmet.

The building dates from 1871.  Or rather a building just like it dates from 1871 – that one burned down in 1974, but was rebuilt four years later.

We had lunch plans, but we still had a few hours to go, so we decided to walk back instead of just hopping on transit.  (That, and it was a bit of a hike back to the transit stop.)  We ended up at a modern art museum, which is normally our bag, but the one exhibit on offer didn’t sound that exciting.  So we just headed back downtown and wandered around until it was time to board the bus for lunch – at the beer museum!

You’ll never guess what brand of beer is made in Sapporo.  Never never.

At any rate, the museum has a fascinating history of the brand, including why Japan started making beer in the first place, and why in Hokkaido specifically.  (Hint – easier to get ice.)  My favorite exhibit was the bottles from World War II, when all the branding was removed, and they just said “Beer.”

The audio tour had a bunch of extremely earnest actors acting out a bunch of extremely earnest scripts about imaginary vignettes in the history of Sapporo Beer.  I think Leigh and I will probably be quoting “I don’t like bitter things!” back and forth to each other forever.

At the end of the tour, we did have a tasting of three different kinds of Sapporo beer, all of which were… fine. Let’s be honest – Sapporo isn’t the most exciting beer on the planet, but it’s fine.

After splitting three reasonably large beers on an empty stomach, we were definitely ready for lunch. The beer factory campus has a number of restaurants specializing in different things, but we were after a local favorite – Genghis Khan!

What, you ask, does a Mongol emperor from the 13th century have to do with food in Hokkaido?  Well Genghis Khan is a dish cooked on a round iron plate that sort of looks like a Mongol helmet.  That’s basically it.  The Mongol empire tried to invade an entirely different part of Japan at one point, and was rained out twice. However, the dish was invented in Hokkaido in the 1930s.

So how does it work?  Well, first you put your jacket in a bag to prevent it smelling like grilled lamb, and don a bib.  Next, the server lights up the grill on your table and a robot brings you some meat and veggies. (The robot is, as I understand it, optional.)

We, um, forgot to take a picture of the grill itself, which is the thing that DEFINES the dish.  Oops.  Anyway, you grease the grill up with lamb fat, layer the veggies around the bottom of the grill, and then grill mutton or beef up on the top of the dome.  Everything smells amazing (note the SERIOUS ventilation system up top), and the lamb juices run down and flavor the veggies.

It was absolutely delicious, marred only by the fact that a) they forgot to bring us the fat until we asked for it, and b) they also forgot to bring Leigh’s meat and rice, and we didn’t realize there was supposed to be more until after we had paid.  Oops.

At this point, it was raining pretty hard, so we decamped to a nearby shopping mall to wait out the weather and maybe look for a kids manga for me to practice my Japanese on.

After the rain abated a bit, we headed back into town to see what other trouble we could get into.  We found a great little tea shop, where the host demonstrated how to prepare Japanese tea – it was an interesting compare and contrast with the similar demonstration we’d had in Thailand eight months earlier.

Even though we failed to document that, we DID get a picture of the mango pastry we had as a snack.

This was in the basement of a department store.  There’s always amazing food in the basements of Japanese department stores.

For the rest of the afternoon, we just wandered in and out of various stores, including an ENORMOUS pop culture store called Mandarake.  It would probably have made more sense if we a) knew anything about Japanese pop culture, or b) knew Japanese.  But it was still fun, in a maximalist sort of way.

For dinner, we wanted to try one more Hokkaido specialty – soup curry!  I had several possibilities on my map, all of which turned out to be absolutely full to the gills, with wait times on the order of an hour.  Reddit to the rescue, and we found a delightful little hole in the wall to get our fix.

So what IS soup curry?  Regular Japanese curry tends to have a very thick sauce made with roux cubes.  Soup curry is much thinner, spicier, and tends to have a mountain of vegetables.  Comme ça: (Or should I say, このような:)

Doesn’t that look amazing?  It WAS amazing!

Now, I don’t want you to get the idea that all we think about on vacation is food, but let’s be honest – that really is most of it.  The last iconic Sapporo dish we wanted to try before we left was Shime-parfait, which has become extremely popular in the last ten years or so.  What is?

It’s parfait.  Just fancy.  I had spent quite a bit of time trying to pick the perfect one out of the amazing spots we had seen online to try, and didn’t allow for the fact that approximately a million other people had ALSO done that, so the first two places we went to had lines over an hour.

Which is how we ended up as the only two customers in a fifth-floor bar the size of a Subaru Outback that nonetheless advertised parfait.  Was it TikTok bait?  Probably not.  Was it delicious?  Hell yes. Hokkaido is famous for melon, for good reason.

And then bed.

One of the big reasons we love to travel is to eat delicious local food, and we decided to hit the ground running in Sapporo with a visit to the Nijo Market.  It’s one of those hybrid “tourist destination but place where you can also just buy a big pile of food” places that you see frequently, including our very own Granville Island back in Vancouver.

We arrived fairly early, and even so, some of the places were already starting to draw a line. But we managed to find a spot at a counter and order our first donburi of the trip.  I opted for a variety bowl.  Leigh, however, knew what she wanted: “Bring me a big pile of tuna, salmon roe, and especially scallops, and I will be delighted.”  So they did. And she was.

You could tell it was a place accustomed to tourists – the manager came out and insisted on taking our picture. Also appearing – the grilled scallop included with Leigh’s combo.

After breakfast, we had some time to fill before we could go eat some more, so we went to look at Sapporo’s most famous landmark, the beer factory.

No, just kidding – the beer factory was Wednesday.

Instead, we went to the Sapporo TV tower.  Here it is from below:

And here’s the view from the top:

And here’s the tower mascot.  It’s Japan – EVERYTHING has a mascot.  This one’s name is Terebi-Tōsan.  Which literally means “Television Daddy.”  I am not making this up.

We didn’t have any formal plans after that other than just sort of wander around and soak up the city and try to recover from the jet lag. We got some fancy caffeine, looked at a clock tower and a fountain, and visited two small galleries, one for crafts, and one for photography.

Here’s some photographs of farm animals. (You can always click to make any of these pictures bigger.)

And here’s a carved bear and cub.

And by this point, we were ready for lunch! One of the foods that Hokkaido is known for is miso ramen.  The (probably apocryphal) story of the origin of miso ramen is that a drunk customer demanded that their ramen be dumped into a bowl of miso soup, rather than the traditional broth.

Whether or not the story is true, the generally agreed birthplace of the style is a small lunch counter located inside a stationery store.  Seriously – I held our place in the (long!) line while Leigh went and looked at fancy pens.  Once we got in, it was definitely a “eat your soup and get out” sort of place, but the soup sure was good.

After lunch, we decided to go visit a nearby aquarium.  This was not an enormous museum like the one in Osaka – just a small, carefully curated collection of marine life.  Including these cuddly little guys:

Also these cuddly little guys:

(Note: cuddliness not guaranteed.)

We have mentioned in some of our previous travels that we have a good friend who is a SERIOUS gourmand.  When he tells us where to go, we go there. (See our meals with him in Kyoto here and here.) We asked him where to eat in Sapporo, and he recommended Tempura Araki, an 8-seat omakase tempura restaurant. (I had to go online a month out and stab the reset button repeatedly at just the right moment to make sure we got reservations.)

It was so fancy we could barely identify the door from the outside, that’s how fancy it was.

Over the course of a lengthy meal, we were served an incredible quantity of dishes, not all of which we photographed.  But here are a few highlights:

Fried octopus:

The best tomato you have ever eaten:

Fried local corn:

A fried seaweed sheet, lightly garnished with a small hint of sea urchin:

This was a hell of a meal.  Stuffed and reeling from jet lag, we staggered back to our hotel through the crowds and called it a night.

Our final day in Japan wasn’t terribly exciting.  We had breakfast at a coffee shop, and then checked out of our room.  (Remember the crappy umbrella we bought on the first day and had been carrying around with us ever since?  We donated that to the hotel supply.)

We went to the department stores in Ikebukuro station and bought some souvenirs for friends and family, and then boarded the train to Narita airport. We had one critical task to accomplish at the airport – we needed to spend the rest of the money on our IC cards.  Fortunately, there’s a 7-11 inside the security cordon full of people doing exactly the same thing.

For our final meal in Japan, we had conveyor belt sushi, which once again was far better than it had any right to be.  And that’s the trip!  Our return flight was utterly uneventful, and we landed about six hours before we took off.  Thanks, date line!

To wrap up this journal, I’m going to post some pictures of interesting translations.  To be clear, our Japanese is terrible, and we give carte blanche to anyone to make fun of it.  But in return, here’s some of the more amusing ENGLISH text we saw on the trip.

Again – the only reason we were able to function in Japan at ALL is that nearly everything is labelled in English.  We were EXTREMELY grateful for this fact.  But translation does go awry, and the fact that we are posting these doesn’t mean that we aren’t grateful for all the times it didn’t.

The main Tokyo fishmarket used to be in the Tsukiji neighborhood.  If you got there at 5 AM, you could watch tuna being auctioned off, then dodge forklifts to get to amazingly fresh food stalls.

A few years back, it was decided it might be better to separate the “tuna-and-forklifts” portion of the operation from the “crowds of people trying to get breakfast” part, and the wholesale market moved out to Toyosu. Not too far from the art exhibit we had been to the night before, in fact. The outer market with the food stalls largely remained in Tsukiji.

Since we didn’t want to spend the night in a karaoke parlor, we had gone back to our hotel the night before. But since we wanted to get breakfast in Tsukiji, we hopped on the train promptly at 8.

8 AM.  Rush Hour.  In Tokyo.  On a train headed directly into the city.

I have drawn a helpful map to explain the situation.

That 20 million people is a made up number, of course.  40 million people live in the greater Tokyo metro area, but how many of them were really between us and breakfast?

A lot.

We boarded a subway train with 12 cars, the platform for which was longer than a city block.  This train runs every 5 minutes at rush hour. Nonetheless, when it arrived it was as densely packed as I had ever seen a subway car. Despite this, a sold twenty or so people, including us, pushed into the car via our door alone. (This was repeating itself at all three doors on all twelve cars.) As standees, you are crushed together with everyone around you so solidly that breathing becomes restricted.  For 40 minutes.

I can now say a) that I have experienced one of the great wonders of the world that is the Tokyo metro at rush hour. and b) I have no desire to ever do so again.

But we made it to our station alive, and started walking towards the market.  We stopped to investigate an interesting temple, which is a strange mixture of Japanese, Indian, and Western architectural styles.

This is the Tsukiji Honganji temple, and it dates from the 1930s, replacing one that was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake.  It belongs to the same school of Buddhism as the giant wooden temple just north of the Kyoto train station, Jodo Shinsho, or “True Pure Land” Buddhism.  It’s definitely unique among the temples we visited.

But we weren’t here for temples, we were here for fish.  The Tsukiji Outer Market is a maze of little twisty passages, all alike. As always, food needs to be consumed more or less where it was purchased. We started with some absolutely ridiculously good sushi, to the point where we had already eaten half of it before we even remembered to take a picture. It was also insanely cheap.

At this point, we pretty much fell down in the “photography” department.  According to my notes, we had Sushi, Squid on a Stick, Grilled Tuna Skewers, Fresh Fruit Sodas, and a Fish Burger. This was all a result of simply wandering up and down the tiny market streets and pointing at what looked good.  The fish burger in particular was excellent, and we’d never have found the tiny shop selling them if it weren’t for watching so many YouTube videos in advance – the shop is down a tiny offshoot alley that we’d likely never even have spotted.

The case on the left side of the picture has fish of various types.  You pick your fish, and they turn it into a fried fish sandwich while you wait.

It may look humble, but it was outstanding. The sushi was outstanding.  The squid on a stick was outstanding.  This guy was probably outstanding, I have no idea, we didn’t talk to him.

Our bellies full, it was time to go elsewhere.  Our plan was to visit the neighborhood of Shimokitazawa, which was described to us as a neighborhood with a cool, hipster vibe. “Cool” would be nice… I know I haven’t bitched about it for a few paragraphs, but it was still incredibly hot.  Every day had a rhythm of “do stuff until we can’t face moving any more, then go find some A/C”.

On the train, however, we realized we would be passing right by Harajuku, and decided to hop off and see if the woodblock museum that we missed on Saturday was open.  Nope.  Change of exhibits.  We did, however, get a chance to walk down Takeshita street, which was merely crowded, rather than bonkers like Saturday.  Sadly, we appear to have neglected to take any pictures, so here’s one from a previous day of a cat flipping you off.

After that, we did make it out to Shimokitazawa.  As promised, it had a cool, hipsterish vibe.  Lots of vintage shops. Lots of coffee shops. Lots of statues of Mickey Mouse, destroying a guitar.

OK, just one of those.

Still, it was a fun place to wander around.  Very quiet, which was a nice change from the chaos of the last few days. When we needed our next AC break, we found a coffee shop with absurd ice cream sodas.

We weren’t really hip enough to be allowed in here, to be clear.

From here, we decided to go check out a mall called “Nakano Broadway”, which has been described as “Akihabara West.”  From the subway, you walk down a covered shopping street to the mall entrance.
The mall itself is four BIG floors with a number of different stores. A lot of them sell watches, for some reason.  But the biggest category is anime merchandise. Figurines upon models, upon clothing, upon books, upon figurines.  So many figurines.

The most interesting part was the consignment sections. A number of shops consisted of nothing more than rows of floor to ceiling, neon lit glass cubes. Each cube was rented by a seller who was looking to display and sell their used anime goodies.  I don’t know how the actual sale process works, since I didn’t actually want to spend several hundred dollars on a rare Evangelion figurine.

After this, we decided to split up – I went to a nearby arcade to play some rhythm games, and Leigh went to look for Japanese skin care products.  While walking to the arcade, I snapped the picture on the right.  The one on the left is from Shimokitazawa.  Strikingly similar composition. Shows how much imagination I have.  At least you can’t see my finger in the left one.

  
Rhythm games in Japan continue to be incredibly fun, and very good value – I played for nearly an hour for about 3 bucks.

Dinner time, and it was our last chance to visit an Ainu restaurant I had been wanting to check out.  The Ainu people are the indigenous population of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island.  Like indigenous peoples everywhere else in the world, their culture has been violently suppressed for generations, and what’s been preserved is due to the dedicated efforts of the survivors.

My meal of wild boar and salmon broth was fantastic, and the hosts were extremely friendly.  The restaurant’s name is Harukor Ainu Restaurant, it’s near the Shin-Okubo station on the Yamanote line (just north of Shinjuku), and if you’re in Tokyo, I strongly recommend a visit.

And with that, it was time to head back to our hotel and pack. Over more than two weeks, we had Japanned all the Japan we could possibly handle. Time to go home.

Leigh’s conference theoretically had another half day to go, but she had basically conferenced all the conference she was capable of conferencing, so we decided to spend the whole day exploring the city.  We started with another delicious train station pastry breakfast, but while we were eating, she spotted an extremely critical item…

… a Moomin gachapon machine.

Moomin, for those as unfamiliar as I was before meeting Leigh, are a Finnish media property involving creatures that look like Hippopotami, but are apparently trolls. And for some reason, are also located in a gachapon machine in Japan.

She got Little My, in case you were wondering.

Something else I learned while writing this pots.  Gachapon machines are named for the “gacha” noise the crank makes, followed by the “pon” noise of the capsule falling into the chute.  The more you know…

From there, we headed to one of the major tourist sites in Tokyo, the Senso-Ji temple complex.  It’s famous for a reason – the gates and the temples are imposing and beautiful.

This is the Kunarimon gate, which was originally built in the 10th century.  However, this one is from 1960.

The gate leads to a long shopping street, but much less cool than most of the others we visited, as it was more or less entirely geared towards tourists such as ourselves.

On the other hand, I’ll point out that this street has ALWAYS been geared to tourists visiting the shrine.  The only difference in the modern incarnation is that there’s more T-shirts and fewer… not T-shirts?  I don’t know what Edo period tourists would have considered a desirable 安ぴか. (What Google translate assures me is Japanese for “tchotchke”)

At the far end of the street is another massive, imposing gate.

Again, while the original dates from the 900s, this steel-reinforced concrete structure was built in 1964.

I don’t mean to be glib.  The REASON this structure had to be rebuilt was World War II, which obviously no joking matter. (Although the previous Edo structure, was also built to replace the one before THAT that was destroyed in a different fire.)  It’s just a consistent pattern in Tokyo that you can appreciate the incredible architecture of these structures, while bearing in mind that they are copies, and also thinking about why these copies exist.

Inside the second gate was a number of shrine buildings, which were all quite packed, so we were startled to find a nice quiet little garden only steps away that we more or less had to ourselves.

We also got a fortune from the fortune telling machine.  You shake a stick out of a container of sticks, and them open the drawer corresponding to the number on the stick and take the fortune.  Ours was a BAD fortune, so we left it behind, tied to the structure placed there for precisely that purpose.

Also in the vicinity we found this interesting grave, which is apparently for a famous early 20th century actor and comedian named Soganoya Gokuro. (The birds aren’t real, but – are any?)

After wandering around a bit more looking at the other shrines and graves in the vicinity (including a sign for a ceremony for blessing pins and needles) we started moseying back towards the metro station, at which point I decided to follow the coordinates for a geocache.  They led through this tunnel, which I GUARANTEE was only ever visited by tourists if they were looking for the same cache we were.  Leigh can’t say I never take her any place unique.

But we did find the cache, and ended up walking along the river a little bit.  This is the Tokyo Skytree and the headquarters of the Asahi beer company. (Which is which is left as an exercise to the reader.)

And after that, we were off to our next stop – Akihabara!  Known as “electronic town”, Akihabara is famous for arcades, electronics stores, and anime and manga merchandise.  It’s also back in the penumbra of the curry district, so after perusing a little arts and crafts arcade for a bit, we did that for lunch.

I’ve not had cheese on a curry before, but I regret NOTHING.

There’s a large shrine in Akihabara called Kanda shrine, which is in many ways similar to the other ones we’ve visited. However, there was one really neat feature that we learned about once again from the “History of Japan” podcast.

The tablets you see in this picture are a standard feature at shrines and temples around Japan.  Visitors will write wishes on them for benefits from the resident deity.  Some of them are simple things like “I want to do well at school this semester,” while others are quite poignant requests from folks with a lot of terrible stuff going on.  Because of the latter category, we opted not to photograph these from any closer in, but what makes Kanda unique is that a LOT of the tablets here have art on them!

Akihabara is not only the district where a lot of anime merchandise is sold, it’s also home to some of the animation studios where it is made, and there’s really impressive artwork on a number of these tablets.

We did visit one other shrine in Akihabara, at the absolute other end of the imposing spectrum.

You know “Up?”  The Pixar movie that you can never, ever, watch a second time because of the first ten minutes?  The one where they build an entire skyscraper around Ed Asner’s house, because they can’t get rid of it?

This is the Hanabusa Inari shrine.  It has been here significantly longer than any of the surrounding buildings. It’s in a tiny space between two buildings, located off a narrow alley located off an only slightly less narrow alley.  It’s pretty damn cool, isn’t it?  It’s apparently dedicated to a spirt of food.

I suppose we should post a picture of Akihabara itself, too.

Yep.  Pretty much exactly as advertised.  We did go into some game, electronics, and anime stores, and they were fun to poke around in, but mostly didn’t allow pictures.  We played a … what’s the opposite of virtual? Actual Reality? Virtual Virtual Reality?

Anyway, we played Pong with real pieces.

You spun the knob, and the physical paddle physically moved and utterly failed to prevent the physical ball from scoring.

We also went to an arcade with a lot of rhythm games, and had fun trying to figure out how they worked while local teenagers next to us were playing so fast I’m surprised they weren’t giving off Cherenkov radiation.

We needed a break at this point, so we went and had some NON blue beer at a local brewery located under a train bridge.  After this it was time for dinner, and we spent a while trying to locate a restaurant recommended by a friend of ours on the Discord for the Youtube channel “Chinese Cooking Demystified.”  (Great channel, you should watch it.  Start with “Old Buddy Noodles.”)

Tokyo is absurdly dense.  We finally realized the restaurant we were looking for was in a four story building with a tiny restaurant on each floor surrounded by uncountable other buildings with restaurants on every floor.  The one we wanted was on the third floor, had eight seats, and served one of the most amazing pork bowls I’ve ever had. Which, including the beer, came to less than ten bucks.

While at the pork bowl place, we started looking at tickets for an art exhibit we had been considering, and realized that we could get in that evening if we bought the tickets online and hustled.  So we did.

This exhibit is called “TeamLab Planets.”  Most stuff we did in Tokyo was actually pretty cheap – even the National Museum was only about ten bucks to get into.  This was closer to forty per person. And VERY certain of its own profundity.

We were informed that we were going to be connected to the experience of the shared humanity of… whatever. Something.  The verbiage was too pompous to take seriously, but the actual exhibits were pretty neat. Plus, it was fun trying to photobomb wannabe influencers’ selfies.

This one felt like you were in the middle of a 3D starfield.

This one had you wading through water with fish projected on it.
This one had giant balls.

One of the most interesting, though, was a room full of orchids trained onto strings, which automatically lifted out of your way as you walked toward them, and lowered behind you, so you were always surrounded by orchids.

Overall, a very cool experience, as long as you didn’t take it too seriously. In other words, do NOT take it as seriously as it takes itself.

Whew.  What a long day!

On Sunday, Leigh had another full day of conference stuff to attend to, so I was once again left to my own devices.  I planned to spend some more time in Ueno Park, particularly at the Tokyo National Museum, but since I had some time before the museum opened, I decided to check out Yanaka Ginza, a street described in the tourist guides as “old-fashioned”.

Unfortunately, not much opens early in Tokyo, but that did mean I was able to get a nice shot of the art on these shutters.

I also caught the very end of some sort of procession featuring senior citizens with flowers on their heads.

From there, I started making my way towards Ueno.  I passed this, and was absolutely baffled.

Why is there a stone sculpture of what appears to be a cartoon character in front of what appears to be a Buddhist temple?  After-the-fact research seems to indicate that that is “Baikinman“, the villain from the “Germ Planet” and leader of the Viruses. And the Buddhist temple may also be a kindergarten?  I’m really not any less confused.

My route continued through a graveyard, where I was able to (though a fence) photograph the grave of the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu.

Moving on, I had timed my trip to arrive at the Tokyo National Museum just about as it was opening.  The museum grounds are enormous, and consist of quite a few buildings.  This “black gate” is one of two remaining Edo period gates in Tokyo.

Plus, “The Black Gate” sounds metal as hell.

Once I entered the grounds, I spent all of my time in the “Japanese Gallery” of the museum. Visiting all of the buildings would take at LEAST two days to give the entire museum its due.  Surprisingly, almost everything in the museum can be photographed.  Here’s some samples.

The Imperial Palanquin

This frog has seen things…

This crabs on this bowl are all one piece with the bowl itself.

And as an interactive exhibit on the way out, visitors could make their own Ukiyo-e wood block prints.  Ukiyo-e is a distinctive Japanese style of color woodblock printing, where each color is applied to a carved block which is then applied to the final image one at a time.  When you think about Japanese visual art, you are very likely thinking of this style of printing.

Here’s a stunning one from the museum.

The way the interactive one works is that you are given a blank piece of paper and there’s a series of stations with frames to hold the paper in place and a large rubber stamp.  You stamp each color onto the paper, and voilà!

Remember, this page was BLANK when I started.  Pretty nifty souvenir.

At this point, it was lunch time, so I wandered out of the museum and toward the shouting and music I heard from further into the park.

When later describing to Leigh what happened next, I opened with “The nice Australian man said the blue beer was delicious, but I shouldn’t have listened to him.”

There was a beer festival going on, familiar in a lot of ways from any similar festival in North America.  Tourists who could show their passport got in free. Dozens of tents selling beer and food on sticks.

The entertainment was wannabe idol groups, mostly set on proving unambiguously that they did not have the aid of Autotune.

And there was blue beer.  It was not good, no matter what the nice Australian man said. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting.

The park contains lots of other stuff, like a memorial to that time Ulysses S. Grant planted a tree.

There’s also a shrine dedicated to the FIRST Tokugawa shogun, coming full circle from the gravesite earlier.

At this point, I was ready for a break (the heat had NOT magically abated, and I’d been doing a lot of walking), so I headed back to Ikebukuro to relax in the hotel for a bit before heading down to Takadanobaba to do probably the LEAST relaxing thing I had planned for the whole trip.

Before we get to that, a quick note on Takadanobaba.  Every train station in Tokyo plays a little jingle to announce the train doors are closing.  At the subway stops, the jingles are all unique, but that’s not necessarily the case for the above-ground rail lines.

However, it’s DEFINITELY the case for the Takadanobaba stop on the Yamanote line, which plays the theme to “Astro Boy.”  Apparently Astro Boy was actually based in the neighborhood.  There’s a big mural under the train tracks that I didn’t photograph because there were a bunch of protesters in front of it.  What were they protesting?  No idea, my rudimentary Japanese only sufficed to determine that they were not professing a desire to be taken to the train station.  That would have been silly anyway, considering they were directly under it.

But not taking pictures of murals is NOT the stressful thing I had in mind.  Rather, as someone with a whopping year and a half of jazz piano lessons under my belt, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to go to a jam session.  In Tokyo.

Not to bury the lead, the experience WAS pretty cool.  The place was tiny, and the owner bounced back and forth between playing saxophone with the house band and tending bar.  If you wanted to play, you put your name down on a list, and after the house band’s set, they started calling people up to play.

I was paired with a local on drums, and three other Americans, two of whom were friends and colleagues of Leigh’s that she had brought with her from the conference.

So… yeah.  That happened.  We played Corcovado. Leigh’s friends were amazing, and I am informed that I did not humiliate myself TOO badly.  And the bass player rapped “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” instead of taking a solo.  That happened too.

The second time I got called up didn’t go as well, but the fact that I was even able to force myself to give it a go at all is something I’m proud of.

Afterwards, the three of us and Leigh went and got ramen.

Saturday morning was Leigh’s conference presentation, using her freshly rebuilt slides.  I came out to watch, and as far as I could tell, it went over very well.

The conference would only last a half day, so I headed back to town with plans to meet Leigh later after she got done.  Not wanting to get too far away, I spent the morning in the vicinity of Ikebukuro.  The first thing I visited was a girls’ school designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Unfortunately, there was some sort of event going on, so I couldn’t go inside, but it was still pretty neat.

Next, I wandered down to a lovely little neighborhood Japanese style garden park, which had a sternly worded sign out front.  Google Translate informed me that a TURTLE had been found in the pond, and anyone caught dumping turtles in the pond would be in big trouble.  Remember kids – when you go to Japan, don’t dump turtles.  (Don’t do it anywhere, they’re a serious invasive species issue in a lot of places.)

Leigh messaged at that point that we would be having lunch with two of her undergrad students, who had made the trip all the way to Japan for the conference.  I had read that the department store on the WEST side of Ikebukuro station had a nice food area, so I spent half an hour trying to locate the correct elevator to get to it.

I should mention – there’s two department stores in Ikebukuro station.  The one on the west (西) side is called Tobu.(東武) The one on the east (東) side is Seibu. (西武) It is apparently an absolutely deceased equine to point out that the western store has the character for east in its name and vice versa. “Park on a driveway and drive on a parkway” level of eye-rolling “we know.”

We ended up not eating in that food area anyway.

After lunch, we went to see a dance festival that I had found an article about before we left.  Called a Yokosoi, it’s an ancient style of dance that dates all the way back to (checks notes) 1954. Still, that’s getting pretty ancient at this point.  And the dances were amazing.

Each group consisted of a large number (20-50 or so) dancers, a few people waving very large flags, and a hype man, who narrated and chanted along with the music. I’m pretty sure the actual term is not “hype man,” but I’m going with it. (Which is not to imply that this person was always male-presenting, as they absolutely were not.)  The other defining feature of yokosoi is a small clapper called a naruko, which is always incorporated into the dance.

The groups ranged from reasonably good (including one delightful group that seemed to consist entirely of senior citizens) to absolutely spectacular, with phenomenal dance moves, costume quick changes, and flags the size of Luxembourg.

This one had two small children on stage for no apparent reason other than it was cute. Which it was.

The amazing thing is how MANY groups there were.  Each performed for about three minutes, and then a minute later there was another one.  For HOURS.  Over two days and five stages.

This stage was at the corner of Yoyogi park, a large park that contains the shrine to the Meiji emperor.  In addition to legendary figures like Inari, shrines can also be constructed to memorialize specific people.  The Meiji emperor was “restored” to power at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate after the Americans showed up in the mid 1800s.

However, it’s important to note that what “restoring” the emperor actually meant was moving the real power from the shogun’s “advisors” to the emperor’s “advisors.”  The emperor himself didn’t have any MORE power than he’d had for centuries, he was just being used as an excuse for replacing one faction with a different one.

It’s difficult to learn much about the actual PERSON of the Meiji emperor, but it’s pretty clear he had a serious alcohol problem, which made this massive display of sake barrels at his shrine somewhat ironic.

Irony or not, it did still feel somewhat awkward to take too many pictures of the shrine itself.  Yes, EVERYONE was doing it, but the shrine was full of actual Japanese people, performing the rituals of veneration with apparent sincerity.  Instead, here’s one of Leigh from just outside the shrine, sporting the latest in portable air conditioners.

Seriously, we traded that thing back and forth all trip.  It was an absolute godsend.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, we walked back through the park to the bustle of the city again.  In particular, Harajuku, which is known for being the center of cosplay / kawaii / youth culture in Tokyo.

Although it probably isn’t.  From what I’ve read, it was the center twenty years ago, and now it’s the center of tourists taking pictures of other tourists looking for the center of youth culture.  The main street is Takeshita Street, and we were NOT walking down there.

Nope.  We wandered around a bit and looked at some other stuff.  We found the shrine to Admiral Tōgō, who defeated the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima.  It’s a very important story, which I am not going to go into here except to point out that this long form video about the “Voyage of the Damned” that the Russian fleet took to GET to its destruction at Tsushima is great.

We then realized we were right near a woodblock museum that I had thought about taking us to, but also that it was about to close. Shoulda gone straight there after the dancing.

Which was STILL going on, by the way.

We also so this guy trying to wrangle an absurd number of dogs.

However, at this point, we needed to leave to meet friends for one more quintessential Japanese experience – Karaoke!

We headed back up to Ikebukuro to a place called “Karaoke-kan”.  No, not the one at 1 Chome-23-1 Nishiikebukuro, Toshima City, Tokyo. The identical one two blocks away at 1 Chome-25-1 Nishiikebukuro, Toshima City, Tokyo.  Seriously, there are a LOT of karaoke places in Tokyo.

This was organized by one of Leigh’s fellow conference goers, and over the course of our two and a half hour slot, more and more people kept arriving.  We started in a private room that held about ten people, and by the time it reached twenty or so, the staff realized they needed to move us to a larger room.  There were two tablets that we could use to select songs and perform other functions, although given that the other functions were all in Japanese, we didn’t use those much.

As these were all goers to a music perception conference, the average performance level was perhaps somewhat higher than normal.  Or not, who knows.  I sang “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”

What the Karaoke place DIDN’T have was food other than small snacks, so after the singing broke up, Leigh and I went to a tiny, tiny gyoza place I had found online earlier.

How tiny, you ask?

There were only six seats, three of which were occupied by the owner’s family.  The dumplings were, unsurprisingly, fantastic. We even managed to deploy our terrible Chinese to say “Thank you” to the owner, who was from Taiwan.

My, that was a long day, wasn’t it?

Day 11 was not terribly exciting, from either a photography or a reportage perspective.  Leigh was in her conference all day, so her pictures are full of things like this:

Interesting stuff, but requires a bit of background, and not particularly Japan-specific.

Meanwhile I didn’t do any big things – I just wandered about.  I started the day in Ueno park, which DuoLingo informs me is “a very pretty place.” (とてもきれいな場所) It is, too, although I did see my first evidence of homelessness since we had arrived in Tokyo.

I only wandered around the south end of the park, and mostly failed to find a few geocaches.  I returned to the north end of the park later in the trip, so more here later.

Most stuff in Tokyo doesn’t open until at least 10, so I was at least partially killing time at this point.  Looking at a map, I noticed a nearby shrine (Yushima Tenjin), which as it turns out, was dedicated to education and learning. I like those things, so I wandered over and had a look.

Oh good, more stairs.  Did I mention it was still really, really hot?

Still, the shrine itself was pretty cool, and among other things, still had a functioning gas lamp.

The reason I was killing time is that I wanted to check out the bookseller’s district.  Tokyo does this thing where a lot of the vendors of a particular thing will cluster in one place.  The downside is that you may not have a good used book store near you (although you probably still do).  The upside is that there are DOZENS of used bookstores all right next to each other.

It was REALLY fun to walk past and look at all of them.

However, unsurprisingly, the books were mostly in Japanese, which three months of DuoLingo was really not enough to prepare me for.  I was hoping to find some sheet music, but the one store that had some didn’t have anything that really jumped out at me.

Just down from the bookstore district is the musical instrument district, so I had a peek down there, but I certainly wasn’t buying any of those, and I was too self-conscious to ask to try out a French horn.

And overlapping with both of those districts is… the curry district!  If you Google for the national dish of Japan, the most likely result isn’t ramen or sushi – it’s curry, made with sauce cubes out of a box.

Fortunately, in the curry district, they go a BIT nicer than that, although it’s still a similar sweet-mild flavor profile.  Found a great place where I could try two different styles, separated by a fortification of rice.

After lunch, my plan was to go explore the east gardens of the Imperial Palace, but… I just couldn’t do it – I got maybe a third of the way from the nearest train station to the entrance, and realized that I just wasn’t going to be able to appreciate them properly while trying to stave off heat exhaustion.  So instead I went back underground and made my way to the Seiko museum, more or less reversing the route we had taken a few days earlier to get from Ginza 6 to Tokyo station.

Apparently, most big companies in Japan have a museum dedicated to how great they are.  (This isn’t a Japan-only phenomenon, as anyone who’s been to Battle Creek or Hershey can attest.)  The Seiko museum is full of fascinating old clocks and watches.  Here’s a bunch of them that were fused together in the fire after the Kanto earthquake of 1923.

And here’s probably the most famous Seiko in Ginza. (This is not the museum, which was on a back street.)

I also went to the Yamaha main music store, which had an absolutely amazing sheet music store on the third floor.  Still too shy to ask to play either any pianos or horns, though.

After all this walking and museum viewing, I decided I deserved a treat, and stopped off for some gelato. Matcha and salted watermelon.

I made my way back to Ikebukuro to have dinner with Leigh, who discovered that all of her slides for her presentation the next day had randomly borked themselves, so after a brief flurry of cursing and fixing stuff, we went out for a rather frustrating attempt to find dinner.

I had planned to take us to “Gyoza Stadium”, which is a cluster of different kinds of gyoza shops, inside an amusement park, inside a shopping mall, which I had been assured was tasty and entertaining.  However, the admission price to the amusement park had been raised a LOT since the reviews I read, and most of the shops were about to close anyway.  So we spent quite a while wandering around neighborhood trying to find somewhere to eat that didn’t look too skeevy, but still wasn’t a Denny’s.

We eventually got some chicken skewers at an extremely understaffed restaurant, and vowed to find some good gyoza later in the trip.  (Spoiler: we did.)

So… yeah. Went to book stores – didn’t buy books.  Went to music stores – didn’t play instruments or buy music.  Went to gyoza store – didn’t get gyoza.  Went to park – didn’t actually go to park.  On paper, it doesn’t sound great, but it’s fun to just BE in a new place.