Post Japan Jet Lag

I actually got 4 or 5 hours of sleep the night previous so the day seemed a lot more productive than I had expected it to be.
We walked to the record pressing plant to pick up test presses for the next Schizophrenic release. From there we headed to Yonge street to bring in 15 rolls of film from our trip for processing. We ate at a nearby Ethiopian restaurant while waiting for our prints, which was a yummy way to kill time. Afterwards I picked up a new pair of Chucks to relplace a pair worn out in Japan. Back at the parental's I actually did laundry and we reorganized our luggage. Craig napped, but I resisted the urge, not that I had much of a routine to get back to as I was quite out of work.

After dinner we lugged our bags to Clintons for a punk show that we may have been more excited about if we had not just had our expectations for live music raised through the ceiling with the visit to Japan. We sold some singles and CDs we brought back but all we could talk to people about was our trip. Born/Dead, CCSS and locals Bastardizer failed to impress. It was the first time I saw Brutal Knights play and they were pretty good. Overall the sets seemed way too long by our new standards, which would impair our enjoyment of local punk shows for months to come. Staying awake until 2am and downing a couple of pitchers of beer in the process seemed like quite an accomplishment.

Tokyo Bye Bye

Packing all of our new records, old dirty clothes, souvenirs, gig flyers and camera equipment up was kind of arduous in Daragh and Yuki's teeny apartment. Holy cow did our stuff take up a whole bunch of it. I only had to buy one more bag during the trip so I guess it could have been worse.

We decided to have a Thai lunch with our hosts in Okubo, quite a multicultural neighbourhood for Japan. We stopped in a
guitar shop to check out a bass Daragh had been eyeing. I also spotted this Hello Kitty guitar.



Lunch was amazing. After this we grabbed our bags and Daragh saw us off to Shinjuku to catch the Narita Express to the airport. We actually got off at the wrong terminal and were worried about being late, but as we ended up encountering a 2 hour flight delay we had nothing to sweat. However, in the meantime I was pulled over in the carry on scan. One of the souvenirs I was sure I had put in my checked bags, an ornamental shirokan or ninja star for my bro, got detected. So I had to head to the post office counter and mail it to myself, which only took a week. This is one of the downsides to the super duper fancy dancy wrap job any purchased gift is subject to in Japan, when you pack up you can't remember what anything is.

The airline gave us meal tix for shitty non veg food, but redeemable for beer too so that was a positive. We spent the extra time getting some more souvenirs as they didn't seem too overpriced. I don't know what possessed me to buy green tea chocolate, other than the fact I like eating chocolate with green tea but it tasted like soap and was way horrid.

When we eventually got on the flight I was again plagued with insomnia, managing to get only about an hour sleep. Grabbing a cab at the airport seemed too easy as a guy approached us in the terminal, we got gouged good for a ride back to my ma's in Toronto. I actually managed to sleep a few hours, yahoo.

Kanazawa-Tokyo

We started the day by tagging a post outside some hippy music store near our ryokan.

Then we decided to stock up on souveniers or omiyage for folks back home. We headed back towards Ninja Dera to grab some things on that street. One shop keep was very insistent we try some tea while we checked out her store, in the hopes we might buy it. From the package we gathered it might be a type of plum tea, which can be alright, though there appeared to be hot peppers or something red on it. She brought us cups and encouraged us to take a sip right away. We gulped it and just about barfed all over her, but struggled to remain smiling and appreciative so as not to be rude. I have never tasted piss but I imagine this is what it is like, salty, heady, just disgusting. No sign of plum or hot peppers. She was attentive enough that we couldnt't dump the remainder in her planter or chuck it out into the street so we had to drink the whole thing down. Barf. We bought some stuff in a rush and then headed right to a convenience store to buy beer to wash the taste from our palates.



This awesome sign was outside the beer store.



We made our way back to the ryokan to get our stuff and then to the train station to get our tickets for Tokyo. The station was designed to look like a torii, or tradish Japanese gate, though I also kind thought it looked like a samurai helmet from further away. It is an altogether cool station though.

We took a shorter trip back, so didn't get to see the sea or all of the rundown fishing villages but managed to get a regional beer on the train from the Echigo brewery, definitely the best beer I had in Japan.

We returned to Shinjuku punk market for one last look and then went for a decent tempura dinner. Then it was on to Daragh's to pack and hang out - sigh, our last night here.

Kanazawa

I decided to start the day with the traditional Japanese breakfast. I am one of those food freaks with a myopic idea of what breakfast food should be, toast oatmeal, tofu scramble etc., so I thought this would be a challenge. The hardest part was the fact that this was a huge amount of food. For breakfast I was served: a large bowl of miso soup, a huge bowl of rice, steamed greens, fish, fried egg, some sort of pickled vegetables and a whole pot of green tea. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. It was actually very yummy, and gave me an understanding of why we saw old folks drinking first thing in the morning, this meal prepares you for anything.



Even though it was a grey and damp day we walked to Kenrokuen Garden from the inn. It is a huge traditional garden and is approximately 400 years old. Kenrokuen means "garden combining six," referring to its six focal points of beauty: extensiveness, quiet seclusion, artificial construction, antique elgance, abundant water and wide prospect. Yeah I guess it had this stuff. They stilt alot of the trees over winter to preserve them, but at this time of year the cherry blossoms were beginning their peak. Which is good, at the time of booking our rooms the innkeep was very stressed out by the fact that we could miss them.



The garden's twisty paths and lake made it seem bigger and more serene that it actually was. There were a fair amount of people there but it wasn't as busy as we thought it might be. The design of the garden did make it seem very quiet despite the other visitors.



I decided to have a drink after wandering around a bit.



Just across the bridge from the one end of the garden was Kanazawa Castle. As with many of these castles alot of it was rebuilt but it was pretty, especially framed with all of the blossoms.



After these sights we headed to old Kanazawa, Teramachi, across the Saigawa River with our target being Myouryuji, also called the Ninja Dera. From the outside this temple appears to have 2 floors, but in fact it is made up of four. It seems unlikely ninjas lived there but this temple was built in the 1600s to act as a hiding place for the castle's lord should anyone attack. All of this I learned from brochures as the tours of the place are in Japanese. Us and the other western tourist tried our best to figure out what we should be looking at but found ourselves more entertained at the Japanese tourists astonished reactions to every surprise revealed. No photos were allowed.

After this we got on the bus to look for some Hell Scrolls in a temple that didn't answer their phone or doorbell. We wandered in and stood around impatiently, contemplated stealing a brolly but just left. Then we carried on in search of the Kanazawa Phonograph Museum, yes a combo of two great aspects of Japan, record selection and quirky museums. The brochure describes the allure of records:

"Many people have never seen phonographs or heard their sounds. However, since their warm sounds are said to be conducive to relaxation and healing they are gaining renewed attention."

This place rocked. We missed the tours but were shown around by a very enthusiastic staff member. I got to set up a 1934 Edison player, they also had 1914 Edison and a 1927 Victor. No freakin photos allowed.

Over at a turntable listening station I checked out 2 records pulled on the basis of their covers, one with trains on it and the other with baseball logos. The sporty one featured the incredibly unenthused Japanese commentary of a game - slower than slow it reminded me of why I hate baseball, but at least the sound quality was good. The train one was hilarious, it featured the sounds of various locomotives pulling out of stations, some complimented by school children yelling 'bye-bye' in broken English.



For dinner we went to a crappy over cooked thai resto and wandered around a bit. We saw this dog in a window and it made us miss Nanook. This was followed by another amazing bath and sleep.

Tokyo-Kanazawa

We had to get up super early for our trip to Kanazawa, it takes about 4 hours and as it was on the other side of the island there were fewer train options. The purpose of this trip was to see the Sea of Japan and just chill out in a small town with lots of gardens and cultural things to do. Daragh got up to make sure we were on our way and we said a bleary eyed see ya later. On the way to the train station I thought I had a bit of a head rush, but no wonder as it was early and we skipped coffee and it was just after 7am. As we would read a day later in the paper this was actually a 6.1 on the Richter scale earthquake centered in Chiba, about 100km east of Tokyo in the direction we were headed. We were too sleepy to pick up on this and relate it to the fact one of our train connections was delayed, which seems to be as rare an occurence in Japan as a quake is in Hamilton.


Deciding to pack light as we weren't planning on shopping was a good idea, deciding to not bring jackets because it wasn't too cold out was not a great idea. We saw lots of snow on the train ride there and the highs were about 8 degrees Celsius with a wet, cold wind off the Sea. Sweaters and shirts were not enough, so this kept us walking quickly from the train station to our tradish Japanese inn.

We checked in to the Murataya Ryokan, which was as close to downtown as anything could be, I think. I assumed downtown was the several blocks on the main drag that had covered sidewalks, but I could have been wrong. Covered sidewalks were really appreciated in the cold and wet weather, thankfully we were able to borrow umbrellas from the inn.


Kanazawa has an area preserved as a samurai district, with wooden board houses, peaked tile roofs and narrow cobblestone streets, all just a block away from the main drag.

One thing we noticed about Kanzawa was that english signage and knowledge of the language seems to have disappeared, except for the ryokan. This made finding vegetarian food some difficult, but the inn lady gave us a map with an Indian curry resto marked on it, and that proved alright so we would be back there for a late lunch tomorrow. We wandered along the streets, comparing the cherry blossom lanterns here to those in Tokyo.



After a while we headed back to the inn for an awesome bath and even better sleep on the super comfortable futons that magically appeared in our rooms since we had headed out for dinner. It was fun dressing up in the provided pyjamas and robes, all needed as it was a bit chilly in the room.