East Asia 2023: Part One. Japan

20/9/23. London to Tokyo

On a long-haul flight, when do you reach your destination? The answer appears to be as soon as they serve their first meal. We may have only just had breakfast at Heathrow, but once you’re in the air you’re on Chinese time. The packed Cathay Pacific 777 takes off 40 minutes late due to Brexit-related problems, the airport not having enough of something they call ‘stands,’ but an hour later it’s dinner with a glass of wine, and half an hour afterwards it’s night-night, lights off time, like kindergarteners told to lie on the floor for a nap. At 3pm BST.

Of course, I can’t sleep as Mr Elbow has nicked my arm rest, has his appendage in my stomach for the next 12 hours, and the guy in front is seven foot tall and needs maximum leg-room and, apparently, a near-vertical seat, and because I’m on a plane. So, I watch every Pixar film they have, and Renfield – the most unnecessarily violent film ever made - on a monitor ten centimetres from my face. Breakfast comes at 11pm BST.

The captain makes up time to enable us to get our connection in Hong Kong. A frantic 50 minutes going through the same security and passport checks we’ve had at Heathrow. On the next flight I’m next to a huge Croat whose knees are half way up the seat in front and who spills into my personal space. Breakfast no. 2 arrives at 2am BST. Needless to say, all three meals are heinous, apart from some okay congee which I spill down my t-shirt.

Tokyo Narita is not a nice airport. It takes an hour to get through immigration and customs due to a unique combination of too few staff, bureaucracy and inefficiency. They have these old women finger-printing everybody, but due to the way the queue is organised you only see the first table, meaning the people further down the line have nothing to do. Luckily Donny messages to say he’ll be late because he’s taken the wrong train. Entering the sauna-like exterior and failing to find a smoking place, Mrs Mad declares she never wants to go anywhere ever again.

I had sent Donny money to cover all transport tickets, but he hadn’t bought any. After much bumbling and confusion, we jump onto any train and reach Shinjuku, in time to meet Donny's girlfriend Himari and the Tokyo rush hour. The Japanese are always friendly and polite, but tourists with large suitcases at this time of day are not welcomed. The commuters wait patiently in ten-person long queues marked by footprint-stickers, eyes glued to their phones, graciously letting people off and then surging as one. It reminds me of The Day of the Locusts.

We get to our Airbnb in Kōenji a part of West Tokyo described by various online guides as ‘Tokyo’s coolest neighbourhood’ and ‘the cool capital of punk,’ although I didn’t know this when making the booking. We haul our luggage up 42 steep steps in stifling heat. It’s a small place but okay, with a very wet roof terrace where it’s possible to smoke, and vague threats should you wear shoes in the flat or admit other people to the premises which, of course, we do.

Having had three hours sleep in two days we go for food. First, a beer in a record shop where a middle-aged white American plays Bo Ningen. Then through a covered shopping mall with its hundreds of pachinko machines, a cross between pinball and a slot machine where you play to win balls. Gambling for cash is illegal in Japan, but balls are okay. Oh, and you can swap the balls you win for cash. We pass several young-looking kawaii girls in cartoonish-outfits, touting for salarymen to pamper and flatter in their bars and it occurs to me that Japan is quite unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before

Himari takes us to a tiny place which looks closed from the outside and only has six counter seats. We go omakase and the master, who's standing directly above us on a raised floor, presents us with course after course of beautiful sushi. £15 each including drinks.

It's Wednesday night, but Kōenji is buzzing nonetheless. All the dull-looking shuttered-by-day holes beneath the railway line and in the alleys surrounding have come to life and within these are tiny, tiny restaurants with space for only a few people, specialising in just one type of food. The red lanterns that burn outside make the whole scene look magical.

It's back to the Airbnb, and then to deep, deep sleep.

21/9/23 Tokyo

Turns out the first sleep only gets rid of the deprivation and the jet lag hits the next day. Only one full day in Tokyo, must do some sights.

Wake up at 4am, lay in bed till 6am. We search for the perfect coffee and croissant, sampling many. Probably not a good idea, but they do very good coffee and pastries here. Spend the rest of the day in a daze, could be anywhere. Not helped by a 40-minute wait at Kōenji Station due to somebody having had enough of it all, and then seemingly endless metro trips, only to change lines and do another dozen or so stops. I suppose that’s what London’s like, except London isn’t 33c with 85% humidity and, as every ex-pat that lives in Tokyo is dying to tell you, it was much hotter last week.

Senso-Ji is an impressive temple but barely visible on account of the tourists and, as we find out, Japanese shrines are all about the exteriors. It’s close to the red and white Tokyo Tower, a communications mast shaped like the Eifel Tower but not as tall, and so we tick off Tokyo’s two main tourist attractions in less than half an hour.

Our guide Don-san gives us none of the history and steers us towards the street food stalls. The takoyaki (octopus balls) are amazing, but nothing else is. We go for a couple of beers because it’s so damn hot and our bodies don’t know which time-zone we’re in. 

We never get to see the Imperial Palace, which is a further 100-or-so stops away on the Tokyo metro as the others decide they want to go on a boat trip, which turns out to be a very short moat trip in a pedalo shaped like a swan. It reminds me of that last scene in Excalibur where Arthur’s body floats off in his celestial barge. They are the only ones there during the inevitable torrential downpour, as I search in vain for a designated smoking zone (DSZ). 

Nearby is the Yasukuni Jinja, a well-laid out shrine dedicated to war victims, which has a beautiful garden and a pool full of huge multi-coloured carp. We wonder why nobody else wants to feed the fish until we’re ambushed by a swarm of invisible ninja mosquitos.

I don’t know why I expected Tokyo to be a quick, easy place to visit because as, I’m sure you know, it is the world’s most populous metropolis with a population of 33 million. Everything looks very close together on the map. 

Back to Kōenji to meet Pete who I last saw in 1983. He was in the year below but, because I was young for my year and theirs had low numbers for some reason, I was forced into the rugby team. Pete was the winger and I was the outside centre for no better reason than I didn’t really understand the game, couldn’t catch or pass well, but I could tackle. Every time the ball came down the line the instruction was to throw it over my head to Pete, as he was the fastest runner in the year. That wasn’t very often as our team was terrible and had hardly any possession. So, me and Pete got to talk a lot during the games.

Pete was also a gifted academic. Until he met me. When we befriended each other on Facebook years later he thanked me profusely for introducing him to the Velvet Underground, which emboldened him 35 years ago to drop out of university, go travelling to Japan, marry a local woman, form a band with her that still exists today, become an English language teacher and generally broke. Annoyingly, he looks just the same as when I last saw him.

First, we go to a bar under the railway line where they don’t seem keen to serve us, so I assume that it’ll become an illicit gambling den or bordello later in the evening. Pete orders beer in Japanese – nobody has a clue what he’s saying. They give us boiled quail eggs, which only I eat, and they make us pay for them.

Kōenji is a fantastic place for food but Pete is a vegan. We search for the vegan restaurant I had counted on but it's closed in the evenings. The tempura restaurants are also shut because vegans in Tokyo aren’t supposed to go out after dark on account of their deliciously pale visages.

We bump into Donny and Himari and eventually find an izakaya (a kind of pub with food) that serves plain vegetables, although the chef finds a way of adding a bit of animal or fish garnish to each dish. We order half the menu and it's all good. Donny chooses my yakitori and I get chicken liver, tail and spleen. Have a vaguely interesting time talking about people I haven’t thought about for 40 years, but it’s a fun evening

22/9/23 Mt Takao 

We go to Mt Takao, 46 km west of Shinjuku on the edge of Tokyo, an hour by train from Kōenji. As you approach the densely forested hills, which in England we call mountains, you feel a sense of calm, being away from the hustle and bustle, although it is 31c and 75% humidity. Very few visitors this time of year, perhaps because they read the weather forecast. 

In a square where a man in a red speed skating suit is doing weird things to a tree there is a funicular railway (inaccurately called a cable car) and a very dangerous chair lift with nothing to grip on to, and these get you half way to the top. Return? They ask. Pah! Say I, we’ll be walking down. The funic is pointing downwards, which seems odd, but half way through you realise you’re travelling vertically and the funic is horizontal. It’s the steepest cable car in Japan! I guess we rise 300m in elevation because I can’t be bothered to look it up. 

After some particularly revolting local snacks which taste like tree bark dipped in sweetened phlegm, we begin our climb to the top, being distracted five minutes later by Monkey Park where fifty or so Japanese macaques monkey around, trying to break climbing obstacles and ambushing each other from buckets. We climb the ‘man staircase,’ 112 steep steps, followed by another 50 through some kind of love heart which leads to shrine full of little men with red bobble hats and bibs.

We reach the main shrine - the Takaosan Yakuoin Yukiji Tempel which, I have to say, overwhelms me with its beauty, serenity and thoughtfulness. Shintoism suddenly makes sense. 

We don't go to the summit, which has an all-you-can-drink beer hall. 

Walking down is the easy part, so I assume, but an hour of this at an average 30% gradient turns your legs into jelly, so you have to turn and walk up again to reset your calves. It was sweaty after the steps, but descending into a closed valley with no breeze, my forehead cascades like the waterfalls that surrounded us. Recovering at the bottom in the DSZ, the red speed skater is still there, doing tricks with a stick. We eat a hungry late bento-box lunch. 

Returning east on the Chuo Line full of health but pitying those sitting next to me I have a well needed shower and change of clothes. Then the heavens open in true biblical proportions. Himari and Donny generously host us at another izakaya in Nishi-Ogikubo where they live, but we all agree it's not good. Back to Kōenji for Mrs Mad and me. Pissing down, no cover in the DSZ, we see smokers at a bar. A guy beckons us to sit down and we order beers. 

It’s a yakitori restaurant. The menu offers gizzard, heart, knee cartilage, diaphragm, throat and something called, intriguingly, ‘between the heart and the liver,’ but I play it safe with neck and breast cartilage. 

It’s eleven PM. Sitting on an upside-down beer crate beneath a busy railway line on a seedy street in a Tokyo semi-red-light district, water pouring down the back of my rain jacket, a beer in a plastic cup and chicken offal in my hand, I feel fondly sentimental. My Dad would have loved it here.

23/9/23 Tokyo to Kawaguchiko 

We meet Himari’s lovely 76-year-old grandma Asami, a tiny smiley lady with some English, a penchant for driving in the middle of the road, braking every 20 seconds, fastidious parking and waiting in the car. It takes 30 minutes to drive the first 20 metres, firstly because she has to move her car to let another through and gets lost in the narrow streets on the way back, then because a snack stop is needed at the local 7/11. Many traffic jams later because it’s a Saturday and a public holiday, we reach the edge of Tokyo. Somewhere called Mt Takao which I vaguely remember having been to before, one hour by train from Kōenji, not the four it took by car. 

Himari had asked me a couple of days earlier whether I liked wine (well, duh!), so it appears we're going to a winery. Asami asks if I like whiskey, so it appears for a while that we’re also going to a distillery (she has already gifted me two bottles of rare Okinawa saké). When she asks if I liked beer, I demur. Donny later tells me he had overheard Asami asking Himari what I liked and she responded ‘he really likes alcohol.’ Strangely, Mrs Mad gets no gifts.

His Japanese is excellent, but unfortunately Donny mixes up the word ‘lost’ for ‘died,’ so there follows a 30-minute conversation in which we have to explain that our cat had not died as a kitten and been resurrected, but had become trapped in a neighbour’s alley. I think Asami’s failure to grasp the anecdote was because she wondered why we were telling the story in the first place. 

After getting lost several times we eventually reach a (grape) winery, but it’s more like a wine supermarket. To taste, you have to put a coin in a machine. I put in 500 yen (nearly £3) expecting at least half a glass and receive a tablespoon. Okay, so that was the good stuff. Wrong machine. 

I don’t think anybody had a clue what was going on or where we were going for the entire seven-hour journey - one that could have taken two hours by train. Eventually we arrive at another wine shop where I feel obliged to buy stuff from a man with exaggerated gestures. The staff of the shop pause to go outside and wave goodbye to a coach full of Chinese tourists.

We go to a mall because Donny and Himari want to indulge in their crane-game scam to sideline their dodgy trading card export business. Asami waits in the car. Mrs Mad and I wander around the 100-yen shop marvelling at what you can buy in Japan for 55p. I buy reading glasses, a glasses case, and a cat bowl as they don't have any ashtrays. 

Asami generously buys us dinner in a private dining room, but Donny and Himari are absent. Awkward. First up is oden, a monstrous pond containing slab-like starches that look like giant nematodes - mochi, tofu, stewed daikon, taro, konjac and pulverised rice in a casing that oozes into a splodge once manhandled. This is the vegan option, or would be but for the dashi broth and accompanying skewer of boiled beef tongue. Asami insists on serving Mrs Mad a massive portion onto a tiny plate. “You poor man,” she says as she watches me cut the tofu with my chopsticks. “I will ask for a fork.” I want to explain that’s just how I hold things, but decide it’s best to say nothing.

Asami’s fiddling with the menu on an iPad and seems to be pressing every button. I groan as they bring in two huge plates of thick-cut sashimi, yakitori, an enormous grilled mackerel, edamame, cheesy-sausage-tofu-staff and salad, but Donny arrives to save the day and polish everything off. 

I was expecting Asami’s country retreat place to be some rustic cottage in the forest, but it’s an apartment in a big block of flats. Nothing wrong with the barren flat where we have to sleep on the floor, and it has a balcony! Finally, somewhere to smoke without having to find a DSZ and drink what turns out to be a very decent bottle of Japanese wine. 

24/9/23 Kawaguchiko

Mrs Mad and I go for an early walk. Tennis courts in the country club may have been hit by an earthquake, funny dog poo sign and then - what’s that?! No, it can’t be, surely not, is that Mount Fuji? Apparently, it’s obscured by cloud most of the year and we didn’t notice it yesterday. So begins a day of hundreds of pictures of Fuji, in case the clouds come. I walk across a very uniform cemetery to a field full of busy football pitches to get a better view.

 

What a contrast in the weather. Tokyo was hot, humid and wet. Today is 23c, low humidity and hardly a cloud in the sky. Everything looks beautiful. Asami later tells me that, although she’s been here hundreds of times, this is the best Fuji weather she’s ever seen. 

After crossing off an item on my bucket list - eating a Lawson’s egg sandwich, followed by more eggs for breakfast because Asami has free-meal tokens, we are driven up to Step 5 on Fuji. Entering the National Park, we drive over rumble bars which play the Fujian Anthem. There are many inventions in Japan such as this that we need to copy in the west. Oh, and their toilets. Although heated seats are not for me, presumably the toilets can also be used as a photocopier or something. 

Step Five is 2,305m above sea level. The air is thin here. We go for a short walk with views of the beautiful lakes below while Asami and Himari wait in the car. Then we go to a kimono museum, which is surprisingly good, and to the beautiful lake for more pictures of gorgeous Fuji among hundreds of rude Chinese tourists who dare to smoke outside the DSZ. 

We go to a kaiseki (a formal restaurant with a tasting menu) in this tiny place with only 12 covers. Eight courses. Once again, the Japanese struggle with the concept of vegetarianism, veganism or pescatarianism. The tempura courgettes surround a horse meat stuffing and the substitute course for the wagyu beef is pork. I take a picture of every course except the dessert, because I forgot. Trust me, it was very good. Delicious meal. 

Asami spent all day driving us around and paid for everything. We insisted that we'd pay for this meal, but she had sneakily done so earlier. Okay, so we have already hosted her granddaughter in London and will be doing so again, but still. What a lovely, lovely lady. 

25/9/23 Kawaguchiko-Kyoto 

Another beautiful day, cold in the morning. Asami drives us (erratically) down to Kawaguchiko to catch the coach. Goodbye and love to Asami. Mrs Mad may have cried. 

Convenience stores are an essential part of Japanese life and, of the big three - Family Mart, 7/11 and Lawson, the latter is undoubtedly the best. Their fluffy processed white bread with chopped egg and a slight tang of salad cream - beloved by Anthony Bourdain and Dave Chang - is perfect and only costs £1, their other sandwiches being pretty good too. They also serve fried chicken, breaded mackerel, weird looking hot bubbling stuff by the till and machine coffee that actually tastes nice - everything you could ever want. Donny and petite, slim Himari fill up a huge bag with MSG-packed comestibles to satisfy their elevenses, twelveses, onesies, twoses and threeses. The town is bristling with tourists who cluster to have their photos taken outside the Lawson, but that may be because there’s a good view of Fuji behind it.

It's an 80-minute luxury coach ride to Mishima which passes without incident as we circumnavigate Fuji and its suicide forest. There's nothing to do in Mishima and we have a two and a half hour wait for the train because of our son's unexpectedly cautious planning. The coffee shop has the fastest wi-fi I've ever known.

The bullet train is just incredible. It’s been around since 1964 and was perfected only a few years later, the current design dating from the late nineties. It has wide seats and tons of legroom, aisles are spacious, toilets clean and, weirdly, they have smoking rooms. Which makes a train journey in Japan a much easier place to smoke than anywhere in open space. Less than two hours to Kyoto, which only allows for three episodes of ‘Kantaro: The Sweet-Toothed Salaryman’. It's so smooth you forget you're travelling at 200mph. They should slow it down a bit because it’s so nice. We pass through the huge cities of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu, Toyota and Nagoya, which look indistinguishable. A single costs £61pp from Mishima, but you don’t know where that is, so let’s say £77 from Tokyo. 

Kyoto train station is crazy busy and it takes a while to find the exit and bus stop. Donny insists on pulling my inappropriate large soft-top, heavy with wine and saké, complaining all the time, until I demand he gave it back. British bus drivers would moan about annoying tourists and their stupidly large suitcases obstructing the daily routines of the locals, but not in Kyoto. Everyone is just so nice. I give up my seat to a very ancient woman and she profusely thanks me at least twenty times. Looking around the bus, she may have been one of the younger ones. 

We settle into our amazingly eclectic Airbnb, where Donny and Himari somehow manage to get their own house which is connected to ours via a mosquito alley. There's a tiny Japanese garden at the back but I opt to smoke in the yard, sitting on a plastic container that breaks immediately.

Deciding to ignore the local 'flaming ramen' restaurant, which I thought looked fun, we walk what seems like miles to find an okonomiyaki restaurant that’s closed due to ‘illness lasting until October,’ which is impressive fore-knowledge as it’s still September.  We stumble upon a lonely izakaya and it’s fantastic. It looks like a greasy spoon but the cooking is great. Looking forward to exploring Kyoto tomorrow. 

26/9/23 Kyoto 

Back to hot and humid. A gruelling day, not helped by the half bottle of Asami’s saké I drank before going to bed, assuming it was like the ones I use for cooking at home (16%), until Donny reads the label and tells me otherwise (42%). Thought it tasted strong. I later find out that it’s only in Okinawa that they distil their sake.

We hit our local Nijo Castle. A building that appears small at first glance turns out to be a tardis, and we creep bare-footed across its squeaky floors for an hour. There’s not a lot inside but nice gardens surround it. 

Crossing the road to the bus stop I marvel at how the Japanese have created near full employment by paying old people to do utterly useless jobs. A smiling uniformed old woman with a red-light sabre ushers pedestrians across a green-lit zebra crossing. An old man directs vehicles out of a little used car park into a one-way street, as if there was an option to go any other way.

Nishiki Market is a narrow-arcaded street lined with food shops and restaurants. Never has it taken so long to walk 400 metres. Every time I think we might make some onward progress somebody gets distracted. There are baby octopus heads stuffed with a quail eggs, abalone, whelks, octopus with 'toe inside', giant oysters, sea urchins, chicken testicles and lots of unidentifiable fish and meats, but we don't have any of these. I have tempura giant prawn, crab, wagyu beef skewers, squid cakes flavoured with bacon and onion, grilled unagi (eel) and takoyaki. Apart from the undercooked takoyaki, everything is delicious. It's expensive by Japanese standards, but you wouldn't blink at the prices if you were in Borough Market.

We go to a craft beer pub. Mrs Mad doesn’t like hers and forces me to drink it.

Donny and Himari go their separate ways (trading card shops, crane game) so Mrs Mad and I wander the back streets of East Kyoto. A huge shrine! Don’t know which one as there are so many. We gasp up a steep hill, fighting our way through mobs of school children, to the famous Kiyomizu-dera. Magnificent, beautiful, awesome and serene, it would have been if there hadn’t been a zillion other tourists, many of them dressed as geishas. 

To finish the evening, a trip to an okonomiyaki restaurant, a kind of pancake stuffed with cabbage and whatever else you fancy, looking like a giant Byron Bay bug and delivered onto a hot plate, which is something I won’t be eating again. 

27/9/23 Ōsaka

A slightly fractious start to the day because of a difference in opinion over how long a contingency for a time sensitive ticketed event should be given an inevitable bus delay. Luckily, I’m able to rebook on the two-hour local train to Ōsaka (Japanese internet is SO good everywhere) and we arrive at the aquarium just before 1pm. 

After a mugging by a hundred seven-year-olds in white caps, the crowds spread out and the experience is very pleasant. You start on the ninth floor and walk down a gentle spiral slope that circumnavigates the main tank, but there are also several multi-story tanks to the sides, and other stuff as well. Voted the world’s eighth best aquarium according to some site I found on the internet. 

Queues form when the main attraction, two humongous whale sharks, are first spotted, but they’re also there eight more times.

The jury is out over whether the aquarium should host otters, penguins, seals, sea lions and dolphins, but they seem to have a lot of space and I guess you have to watch films such as Madagascar and Finding Dory to make an informed judgement. The other star of the show is a monster spider crab with two metre arms. Could have been a robot. No photographic evidence either because it’s at the back and I’m a crap photographer with a rubbish old camera phone.

 

Eschewing the opportunity to ride the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, we head to the famous Dotonbori district for lunch. It’s like a garish neon-lade Chinatown, except it’s Japanese of course. Ōsakans pride themselves on not giving a toss, so people smoke wherever they want. We settle on a kushi-katsu restaurant with a selection of anything you can think of, breaded, impaled by a skewer and deep fried, a bit like a Glasgow chip shop. Pretty good I thought, apart from the spam. 

Then a contrast of department stores. The first, Don Quijote (sic), is… well, can you even call it a department store? I guess you can if you count the departments for Halloween costumes, snacks and sex toys. There aren’t many shops that can boast a Ferris wheel moving around a giant portrayal of a shogun holding a cartoon owl and a bag of cash. The second store, the name of which remains unknown, has a tenth-floor restaurant complex the size of a football pitch and a branch of Tiffany’s on the ground. Also, a Pokémon shop, which is why we’re there. 

Our final stop before our very long and late trip back to Kyoto (because Donny ‘wasn’t paying attention’) is the Teamlabs art instillation in Nagai Botanical Gardens. We have tea and cake as we wait for it to open. I thought it was mesmerising and wonderful, albeit slightly ruined by bucket list tourists who talk incessantly. The others, who I lose for a while, are a bit underwhelmed. Obviously, my photos do not do it justice. 

28/9/23 Kyoto

Last full day in Japan, gotta get us some more shrines to see. After a very pleasant coffee in the back streets and a wander around the vast gravel tracks in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, we take a one-hour city bus trip to the Western edge of Kyoto, and walk uphill in the sweltering heat for half an hour to the beautiful moss gardens of the impressive Saiho-Ji temple complex. Closed. Or to be more accurate, closed to the public since 1994. If you want to visit you have to send a request via postcard which, to explain for my younger friends, is how we communicated back then. 

It's late September, but the Japanese are keen to be on time for Halloween. 

We go to the neighbouring Kegon-ji, but it’s a small modern shrine. The smiling monk explains that there’s a sermon going on in Japanese, but we can visit the garden for 300 yen per person (about £1.50), which we do for the two minutes it takes to see them. He gives us a sweet each. Despite the obvious disappointment we don't feel that our time has been wasted. It's a real suburb in Japan, there are few tourists and it's actually quite nice.

My brain fried, covered in sweat and smelling awful, we catch a train to anywhere because it has air-con, go on an unsuccessful quest to find cigarette filters then walk back to the Airbnb. I guess if you’ve seen one Shinto shrine, you’ve seen them all. 

A long walk for dinner, first and second choice establishments closed. End up at a fishmonger by day, restaurant by night. No complaints. 

Japan is an extraordinary place and we’ll be back some day. For now I’m going to miss the litter-free streets, the polite and friendly people, the functional yet confusing transport system, Lawson egg sandwiches, the millions they employ just to direct people needlessly, tiny, tiny restaurants that look shut from the outside, 100 yen shops, the weird yet accurate signs, the bus drivers who greet everyone getting on and thank everyone getting off, vending machines on every corner, mobs of identically dressed school children, very careful drivers in hybrid cars and clean public toilets on every block. The toilets, most of all I’m going to miss the toilets and their dozens of buttons that do… I don’t know what they do.