Finally we were going to get a full day in Osaka uninterrupted by typhoons. And as unimaginative as it seems, we decided to go to the major tourist attraction that is Osaka Castle.

There’s a reason it’s a major tourist attraction, after all – it’s pretty awesome.

The tenshu, or main building seen here dates from (checks notes) 1931.  But it’s a reasonable concrete and steel reconstruction of the original one built in 1630.  And the walls and grounds are largely original.

And the grounds are pretty big – from the subway stop it’s quite a long walk to the castle itself.  But there’s lots to see along the way.

Once you get to the castle, the interior is a museum, primarily about the second of the three “great generals” in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. That’s the one who rushed to get in position to take over after general number one died, and then after his death had his son supplanted on the throne by general number three.

That’s a LUDICROUS oversimplification, of course.  The museum also didn’t have a lot to say about Toyotmi’s repeated failures to conquer Korea, for some reason.  But it was still a really well done set of exhibits, and I would recommend it for anyone visiting Osaka with even a passing interest in Japanese history.

After the tour, we had lunch at a nearby rooftop restaurant.  REALLY nearby.

This building is still on the castle grounds, and has signs to ward off the instagrammers who aren’t actually there for a meal.  Or to get married, as was clearly about to happen to someone in the near future.

Lunch consumed, we decided to go check out some art museums further down the river.  But first we had to get out of the castle grounds, another long, scenic, but substantially warmer walk, compared to the walk in.

By the time we got to the train station, we were absolutely melting. We reached the art museum and stopped to appreciate the fact that it’s basically a Borg cube, before dashing into the AC.

And then when we finally got inside, we realized the museum was absolutely PACKED. Something like a thousand people waiting in various queues for different entry times.  What was happening?  Was there a celebrity here?

Turns out there was:

However, a whole lot of locals were lined up ahead of us to see her, and the odds of getting a same day ticket were approximately zero.  So we did the next best thing – we went to the museum restaurant and had a Vermeer themed high tea instead:

In case you’re curious, here’s the Google translation of the inventory:

1st Plate

Smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich
tomato open sandwich
Ham and cheese hot sandwich
Open-faced sandwich with nuts and figs
scone

2nd Plate

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” shortbread
Diana and the Nymphs shortbread
Bockenpoches
Stroopwafel-style cookies
Pistachio Financier
Apple tartlets
Orange and Earl Grey Chocolate

3rd Plate

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chocolate)
Girl with a Pearl Earring Macaron
opera
Dragon Egg Mini Cream Puffs
Blueberry pound cake
Verrine d’été

It was excellent.

But we had not yet seen any ART, so we decamped to the museum next door, where there was a large display of contemporary art. Which was naturally far less crowded.

Folks don’t know what they’re missing, frankly.

By this point it was getting on towards late afternoon, so there weren’t any other great prospects for museums that would be open much longer.  So we decided to walk through a somewhat less touristy neighborhood north of the museums to go find another destination geocache. Said cache was in a nice quiet neighborhood park, with kids playing baseball. Just a great chance to BE in Osaka without touristing, if you catch my drift.

We did also find the cache, but we were absolutely DEVOURED by mosquitoes in the process.

For dinner we went to a group of restaurants under the famous Umeda Sky building.  They’re in a set of hallways designed to evoke a Showa-era street.  We went to one that serves omakase kushi-katsu, which was great fun.  Kushi-katsu is basically things deep fried on sticks. Omakase is “you pick.”

Combined, it meant that we sat at a counter where we were provided with an assortment of dips, and the chef just kept frying things on sticks and handing them to us until we told him to stop.

The big ceramic fish are for the used sticks.  I don’t remember everything we had, but there was definitely shrimp, scallops, lotus root, asparagus, and beef, among other things.

It was now fully dark, and since we were in the basement of something called the “Umeda Sky Building,” it only made sense to go up into the “sky” part of the building to enjoy the view.

You take an elevator MOST of the way up, and then a fancy escalator from one side of the building to the other to finish the trip.

And then once you’re at the top, the view is pretty stellar.

And at this point, it was time to stagger back to our hotel.  We did a much better job Osakaing this time.

For our last day in Nara, I once again got up early to go check out another historical site in Nara park. Today’s destination, Kasugataisha Shrine. The shrine in one form or another dates back to 768 CE, and is the family shrine of the Fujiwara family.  The Fujiwara were incredibly important in Japanese history, and were the imperial regents for centuries.

Their shrine is known for, among other things, the stone lanterns lining the forest paths leading up to it.

Of course, it’s still Nara, so there’s still deer everywhere.

Unfortunately, the main buildings were closed at 8 AM when I was there, but I still got to wander around and look at things from the outside.

All too soon it was time to return for the last day of the conference.  We finished up at noon, and I went to find Leigh so we could try one last local specialty – persimmon leaf wrapped sushi.

It was good sushi.  Wrapped in a leaf. Honestly, the fact that the fish were all lightly brined made it more distinctive than the leaves themselves.

And then it was time to return to Osaka. The last time we visited the city, the entire place was basically shut down for a typhoon warning.  You can read all about that surreal experience here.

So this time, we were REALLY hoping to experience a little more of the city.

This photo should make it pretty obvious where we were staying:

Those HVAC units are REALLY distinctive, aren’t they?  Oh, and also there’s the famous Ferris-wheel-equipped Don Quixote store, which puts us right next to the Dotonbori canal in the heart of the city.  It was a great central location to explore from.

We had had great food tour experiences in Bangkok and Prague previously, so we had booked another one here in the evening.  We arrived at about two, so that gave us a few hours to just bonk around and see what we could see.  We wandered into a stationary store, and up to a garden on the roof of a shopping mall.

From there we made our way through Denden town (electronics, pop culture, and maid cafes) to Shinsekai, an older neighborhood that we had visited on our previous trip. It has a famous tower that we really should actually ascend one of these trips.  Oh well, reason to go back, I guess.

The last time we were here there were a LOT of closed storefronts, but we managed to find a place where we could sit on an oil drum in a puddle and eat takoyaki. It sure would be ironic if the food tour took us back to the same place, wouldn’t it?

We arrived at the rendezvous point to wait for our tour guide, an affable expat from Boston who took us straight to… an udon shop. Whew, irony averted.

THEN we went to the takoyaki place. Because of course we did.  But the takoyaki was just as good as we remember. And I had a drink marked “manly plum,” which was pretty good, even though I have questions about the translation. (Or the ingredients.)

For the rest of the tour we wandered around the Shinesekai neighborhood at night, gawping at the lights and stuffing ourselves silly.  It was great.

This was on a shelf at one of the restaurants.  I don’t know what it is, so please don’t ask.

Replete with delicious food, and having already had a more rewarding time in Osaka than the entirety of our previous visit to the city, we headed past the canal to bed.

Leigh went to Kyoto today, and there’s lots of intriguing pictures in the Dropbox, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t talk about it.

The one thing we didn’t plan on this trip to Nara was any time for me to see, well, Nara.  The only sightseeing I was able to do was if I got up early and walked around before the conference started.  So that’s what I did.

I had walked up to the Nandaimon gate on a prior morning, but today I wanted to check out the actual temple it is the gate FOR.  Specifically, that would be Tōdai-ji, or “The Eastern Great Temple.” There has been some form of this temple on this site since 752, although it has been renovated and reconstructed several times.

It is.. big.

And it needs to be, because it was built to house the largest statue of Vairocana Buddha in the world.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I like big Buddhas and I cannot lie.

There’s some other cool buildings in the area, and if you stagger up a hill in the already quite oppressive heat (at 8 am), there’s a lovely view over the city..

And then it was back inside for the conference.  Today I got to give my talk!

© WTTC20 Local Organizing Committee (LOC)

Riveting stuff, let me tell you.

That night we went to a local banquet hall for the conference dinner, so I didn’t see Leigh at all until quite late. The conference organizers had once again pulled out all the stops, and the dinner was preceded by a demonstration of traditional Japanese music…

…and dance.

And then it was time to eat.  SPEAKING of pulling out all the stops.  This was another kaiseki traditional meal with quite a few seasonal courses, and the selections were quite luxurious.

To top that off – I was seated at a table with two people who were basically omnivorous, three people who didn’t eat beef and didn’t like fish, and one empty place… which the staff still served food to, every course.

Which meant that the three folks on OUR side of the table basically got double helpings of everything as we consumed the unwanted courses from the other side of the table.

I mean – we couldn’t let grilled Wagyu go to waste, now, could we?

It did get to the point where I looked over at the plate next to mine and thought “OK, that’s $50 worth of abalone right there, but I’m just. too. full.”

At least we didn’t have to eat the ENTIRE claypot full of eel. Delicious, delicious eel…

The one awkward thing that happened was when the 16 year old theatre kid seated across the table from us with her parents decided that the presence of a microphone meant that it would be perfectly fine for her to commandeer it and sing a song for the entire room.

That was… a thing that happened.

You know who WASN’T completely stuffed? This friend I passed on the way home.

The conference organizers really wanted to make sure we had an amazing experience, so Tuesday morning they arranged a “Shikayose” or deer-calling ceremony for us.

What do they call the deer  with?

A natural horn, playing, of all things, a 5 note excerpt from Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony.

It does seem to work. More and more deer, obviously trained to associate Beethoven with crackers, came pouring out of the forest to join us as the horn player repeated his melodic fragment over and over.

And once they had summoned an enormous herd of deer – THAT’S when they gave us the crackers. The deer got VERY aggressive at that point, to the extent that it was actually difficult to unwrap the crackers at all without a hungry deer knocking them out of your hand.

Once we were done being molested by ungulates, Leigh went off to have a nice time in Nara, while I went back to the conference. Perhaps she’ll write a post about her experience at some point.

I will continue not to regale you with tales of yttrium target synthesis, but here’s another deer picture I took on the way back to the hotel at the end of the day.

After we regrouped, we did the unthinkable – we went to dinner and didn’t take any pictures at all, even of an empty bowl.  A shame, too, because it was really life-changing soba.

Here’s a picture from Leigh’s lunch the day before at the same restaurant.  The fact that we went back should say something about how good it was.

And that’s about it for Tuesday.  Amazing how actually attending a conference really shortens the blog posts.  I’ll have more to say about Wednesday, though.

As a reminder, I was in Japan to attend the 20th World Targetry and Target Chemistry Conference. I won’t bore you with all the details, but it’s a conference for people who want to irradiate solid (as opposed to liquid or gaseous) targets for the purpose of making radioactive drugs.  Which is what I do, hence the conference.  I would actually be speaking later in the week, but for the first day, I just wanted to get up early and see some sights before I had to spend the rest of the day sitting in a conference hall.

What sights were there to see, you ask?  Well, Nara is most historically significant because it was the capital of Japan for most of the 700s. The Nara period, as that era was known for the initial establishment of the idea that maybe we shouldn’t move the capital every time the emperor dies, and also deciding that this Buddhism thing is pretty cool.  There’s a number of very significant temples and shrines.

That’s why it’s HISTORICALLY important.  The main reason people come here NOW, however, is the deer.

The deer.  They are everywhere.  There will be more about them in future posts.  They are a huge tourist attraction, but it also turns out that they are also somewhat problematic – because they have no predators and are so actively fed rice crackers by tourists, their population is higher than the amount of grass in the park can sustain.  As such, they are on average somewhat undernourished.

Sure are cute, though.

This one is sitting under the Nandaimon (Great South Gate), which is guarding the path to the main temple in the park. I’ll be talking more about the temple in the later entry, but the gate itself is absolutely massive.

Also, unlike a lot of the reconstructions around Japan (looking at you, Osaka castle), this one is original, dating from the late 12th century.

One detail about the conference I will share is that all the sessions took place on a traditional Noh stage in the conference center.  Which was impressive, cool to look at, and meant that all the speakers had to remove their shoes.

While I was conferencing, Leigh was seeing the sights, but since I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you much about it. If she has time, maybe she’ll write a post.

For dinner, Leigh and I joined a number of our coworkers for a great meal at a local izakaya. At which we took zero pictures.  I remember there were things on sticks, and someone who didn’t know that you’re not supposed to chug sake.  A nice time was had by all.

We very much enjoyed our time in Hokkaido, but it was time to leave for the work part of the trip.  Since this day was largely travel, we only took five pictures between us. And one of them was this:

This is going to be a fairly short entry, in other words.

Our bus to the airport left at around 11:15, so we had a few hours to kill. We had breakfast at a nice little pastry shop that had paid to have itself awarded a nice award for its cheesecakes. Something like the Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Receiving An Award for Gold Medals. I dunno, I can’t be bothered to go look it up a second time.

Still was tasty, though.

The morning market being directly adjacent to our hotel, we walked over there and spent some time not buying souvenirs, although the squid hat really was a toss up.

But soon enough it was time to head to the airport, where we managed to try one more dish we hadn’t quite gotten to in Hokkaido yet – salt ramen.  Which is to say, ramen with a thin clear broth, as opposed to a thick soy-sauce or miso based one.  It was good, although I’m guessing we could have done even better not at an airport.

From there it was plane to Osaka, and then monorail to subway to local train to Nara. Lots more on Nara in the coming posts, since we spent nearly a week there.

But the only thing we really did on arrival was go get dinner.  We found a nicely reviewed yakisoba and okonomiyake place close to the hotel, which is right next door to a super big deal soba restaurant.  To the point that they actually have a sign on the door saying “we are not the famous soba restaurant.”

But frankly, they didn’t need to worry – their food was pretty great too.

And that was Sunday.  Tomorrow, the conference begins!

Hakodate’s most famous tourist attraction is the morning market.  It’s larger than the Nijo market in Sapporo, and much closer to the ocean.  It is divided into three areas, one of which is a whole street of functionally identical restaurants all selling donburi bowls. This street was reminiscent of the similar “specialty” streets we had seen in Hiroshima for okonomiyaki, or Seoul for cutlass fish stew.

So for our second time on the trip, we got big bowls of seafood on rice for breakfast.  I got a mix including the local specialties of squid and crab.  Leigh, on the other hand, knows what her favorites are.

Our hunger satisfied, we took a walk around the market to see what else we could see.  There’s a famous stall with a tank where you can go fishing to catch a squid and have it cooked for you.  By 7:30 AM, there was a two hour wait for the privilege.

Which is interesting, because there were about ten more stalls elsewhere in the area where you could do the same thing with no wait.  But I guess the Instagram possibilities just weren’t as good.

We came across someone selling extremely fresh sea urchin on the half shell, and wanted to try that, but after we paid, the vendor pointed to the row of urchin and indicated we should choose one. Now, I don’t know what makes a good sea urchin, but I DO know the word for “you pick for me,” and the vendor found that pretty funny, so he gave us this.

So this was either a really good one that he picked because he found us entertaining, or a terrible one he realized he could foist off on the idiot Canadians.  Based on the flavour, which was delicious, I’m guessing the former.

Also, for those who know how much uni generally goes for, I’ll point out that this was ten bucks.

We also watched a crab do its level best to scuttle away from a vendor, so that was fun.

Once we finished poking around the market, we hopped on a bus out to the Goryōkaku Fort, which is a fortification constructed towards the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.  During the Meiji restoration, it was occupied by rebels intent on resisting the new power structure, but they were defeated and the buildings were destroyed.

However, in the early 2000s, it was decided to rebuilt the magistrate’s house as a museum and historical exhibit.  Seems like it would have been simpler to just leave it up, but what do I know?

A very impressive structure, nonetheless.

The actual grounds of the fort were also well worth exploring.

One point I want to make here.  If you read the blog from our last trip to Japan, it was extremely preoccupied with how ungodly hot the weather was.  Hokkaido in August is not as hot as Tokyo or Kansai in August.

But it IS hot.  We spent the morning wandering around outside at this fort and inside the museum, and we DID get pretty tired and sweaty.  So we decamped to the base of that observation tower in the prior picture to recover, drink a strawberry milk, and think about lunch.  (Hokkaido is REALLY serious about milk, and there’s milk drinks and ice cream everywhere as a result.)

While we drank our milk, I pulled out Tablelog, the Japanese website that’s like Yelp or Google reviews, but with the critical difference that it doesn’t suck.  Turns out there was a very highly regarded sushi restaurant… directly above us?  OK, well, why not?  We’re in a seaport town, why not fish for breakfast AND lunch?

And on stepping into the restaurant we decided we had definitely made a good choice, after they ushered us to our private cubicle.

Let’s zoom in on that sashimi platter, shall we? (And also move back in time to before we ate the sashimi.)

I would like to point out that the WHOLE GODDAM FISH at the upper left of this platter is entirely there for garnish.  Pretty slick.  The platter also included squid, because that’s Hakodate’s thing, and in addition, we decided to try a local specialty of semi-frozen squid marinated in its own liver.

It was… interesting.  Probably won’t be ordering it again, though.

Across the street from the fort was a museum that sounded worth a look, which had a general collection of contemporary Japanese art and a calligraphy collection.  Or at least, that’s how it was described online.  Turns out the calligraphy collection was a single room, and the modern art collection had been displaced for a TeamLab exhibition.  But that’s OK, as it turns out.

The calligraphy exhibition was tough, in that it’s hard to appreciate text art for a language you can’t read.  But one piece in particular really stuck out to us:

This is a poem by a Japanese poet named Yamamura Bocho.  The text of the poem is

“A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A faint wheat flute
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
A field of rapeseed blossoms
The chattering of a lark
A field of rapeseed blossoms”

It’s exceptionally striking how the calligrapher deliberately mimicked the structure of a field of flowers while writing out the poem.

I only wish we had the tools to appreciate the doubtless comparable effects in the rest of the exhibit with more complex texts.

After we devoted all the appreciation we could to the calligraphy room, we moved over to the TeamLab exhibit in the next gallery.  It was… fine.  Definitely nowhere near as elaborate as the exhibition we visited in Tokyo.  Basically a single room of stuff almost entirely aimed at small children.  But we had fun coloring in a turtle and a jellyfish and then watching them swim around on the wall.

Deciding NOT to visit the adjacent fishing museum, which was apparently also entirely in Japanese, we instead stopped at a small cat-themed cafe for a snack before heading across town to go for a nice walk.

Specifically, we walked all the way out to a park at the very tip of the peninsula, where we could see the main Japanese island of Honshu in the distance.   Also more squid.

Still not the final squid of the day, either.

After a lovely hike, where we stopped to grab a geocache or two, we stopped back at a cafe right on the coastline for some crepes.  Check out this view from our table:

This looks vaguely magical realist to me, although I couldn’t tell you why.  After this, we headed into town to kill time until the dinner reservations the hotel had been nice enough to make for us.  While we were at it, we spotted this art, which may or may not be magical.  Definitely not realist, though.

I mentioned dinner reservations.  Reddit and Tablelog had suggested that we might like to try an izakaya called Izakaya Daimonten, known for, among other things, live squid sashimi.

At the time we placed the order, this entire squid was still swimming around.  The bit on the left was sliced up and delicious.  The bit on the right was… still twitching. Rather a lot.

When we finished the sashimi, they came and collected the tentacles and deep fried them for us.

My notes indicate that we also had some fried corn, clams in sake, fried cheese balls, fried octopus, a whole oyster, “plenty of crab” salad, and a couple of whisky sours.

Whew.  What a day.

The main reason we had stopped at Noboribetsu in particular was to explore Jigokudani – a hiking area near the onsens.  Now remember – onsens are hot springs, so clearly something is MAKING them hot.  In this case, it’s another reminder, like Yosemite or Iceland, that the earth hates us and is trying to kill us. (To be fair, with good reason.)

Jigokudani, incidentally, means “hell valley.”

“Hey honey, let’s take a selfie in front of the terrifying infernal nightmare-scape!”

We probably took more pictures of this than anything else on the trip besides the penguins and the deer.  (More on the deer later.)

Then we walked over to a mud pool, and that was terrifying too.

We weren’t being artistic and shooting in black and white – this is a COLOR photo of a metal as hell location.

The whole place was just absurdly scenic.

…and terrifying.  Scenic and terrifying.  Properly in awe of the majesty of the earth, we headed back to our hotel to have breakfast.

After another lovely meal, we headed up the street to watch the animatronic show at the nearby shrine (I can’t quite believe I just typed that sentence), where this:

Suddenly turns into this:

It was… certainly a thing that happened.

From there, we took a bus to a seriously Ghibli-esque train station to catch our ride to our next destination. (I considered typing “Ghibli-ass train station” there, but decided it would be tasteless.) I played the public piano in the train station a bit while we waited to leave. (“I Remember You”, Mercer and Schertzinger, 1941)

Our last stop in Hokkaido was the seaside town of Hakodate, which is quiet and picturesque, and has an incredible affinity for squid.  More on squid tomorrow. When the train arrived, we checked into our hotel (not difficult, since it was attached to the train station) and walked across the street to a local institution, “Lucky Pierrot”.  Lucky Pierrot is a burger chain that only exists in Hakodate.  I cannot explain it.

Seriously – I just can’t. (This picture was taken at night, for maximum terror, but we ate there for lunch.)

Whatever music you think was playing in this picture, you’re probably right.

Weird burger chains aside, Hakodate is a city known for a mix of Japanese and Western architectural styles, since it was one of the first ports opened to western visitors after the forcible opening of Japan during the Meiji restoration. We walked over to the old quarter to gawp at some of that.

Sadly, we were unable to have the Second Most Delicious Ice Cream Melon Bread In The World, because the store was closed.

So we had some melon ice cream instead.  They’re REALLY good at milk and melon in Hokkaido. Also melon bread, apparently, although that doesn’t have any melon in it.

While wandering about, we also saw a truly stupendous sight:

You’ll never guess what was located just a few feet away. No, not beer. OK, yes also beer. But first, just out of frame to the left was Japan’s SECOND Concrete Electricity Pole! Just a WHIRLWIND of a day, I tell you.

So then we got beer.
As it was getting towards sunset, we decided to take a gondola up to the top of the nearby mountain (“Mount Hakodate”, unoriginally enough) and take in the view. With several thousand of our closest new friends.

It WAS a hell of a view, though.

Once we got back to town, we stopped at another brewery for second beer and first squid. First of many, many squid.

But that will be a story for the next day.

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.