Hokkaido, Here I Come (and Go)
Jul. 2nd, 2022 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmIt's been a busy five days, so let's dive right in.
On Monday, I met up with Rei, my tenant in Bristol, who had come to Japan for a couple of weeks to introduce her fiance to her family. (He is a diplomat and has just been transferred from Bristol to Shanghai, so it was the only opportunity for a while.) Anyway, she and her father kindly took me to lunch at a very small tempura place near Jinbouchou, the bookshop district. It was the sort of restaurant with only room for 7 people, where the owner cooks everything before your wondering eyes, and has been doing so for the last 40 years. It was, of course, extremely good, but it was such an intimate establishment that I didn't feel able to be "that gaijin" and photograph it. Rei suffered no such inhibition, though, and found an angle that really brought out the celebrated Butler chin.
Afterwards we went to a second-hand children's bookshop, which was extremely interesting and may have resulted in one or two Shouwa-era purchases. (However, as I'm writing this in a Shinkansen speeding from Hakodate to Morioka I can't show you them.) We had planned to go up Tokyo tower as well, but already the weather in Tokyo, which has since become intolerably hot, was sufficiently unbearable to your correspondent.
Rei also took the chance to show me her alma mater, the imposing Meiji University:
Interesting language usage note. I mentioned to Rei and her father that I had recently received a ticket to the Nagoya sumo basho, which is on my schedule for 10th July (and very excited about it I am). I said "sumo chiketto" ("chiketto" being a common word for ticket, taken straight from English). This made Rei laugh out loud - because, apparently, the juxtaposition of such a quintessentially Japanese thing as sumo and the word "chiketto" was so odd. I asked what would have been a better choice - "kippu" (切符), perhaps? That would have been better, according to her father, but the best would have been "nyuujouken" (入場券). Something to remember for next time - along with my deafness to that kind of error.
The next day I went to Sapporo by shinkansen. Or rather, I went as far as Hakodate (Hokkaido's second city) by shinkansen, after which it was a case of transferring to a limited express (emphasis very much on the first word) for the last leg. It was scheduled as a three and a half hour journey, having travelled the length of Honshu from Tokyo to Hakodate in only about four. I was quite surprised that there's no shinkansen link to what is, after all, the largest Japanese city north of Tokyo, but apparently one will be coming in about a decade, so watch out for that.
I enjoyed the first part of the journey, including a cheeky chicken bento, made the transfer okay and had travelled about an hour of the leg to Sapporo, before grinding to a halt in a small place called Yakumo (which means "Eight Clouds", and it is well named). It was raining, and apparently there was some concern about the track between there and the next stop. This was quite odd, I thought; given that Hokkaido goes for several months of the year under a metre or so of snow (Sapporo has a famous snow sculpture festival), could they really be stopped by a bit of rain?
Yakumo Days
Over the next few hours I was to learn that the answer was an emphatic Yes. I got to know Yakumo station well, as day turned into night. By way of sustenance they did distribute a bottle of water and a small packet of "Calorie Mate" (chocolate flavour) but it felt pretty inadequate. (For scale, this box is about three inches long.)
It took them more than six hours to lay on a bus as far as the next station some thirty miles away ("daikou basu" is Japanese for "rail replacement service," I now know), whence we eventually proceeded to Sapporo. I should have got there by 5.30pm; I eventually arrived at 1.40am. Luckily my hotel was in walking distance, as there were no taxis by then, either.
So, when people praise Japanese public transport in Tokyo, and talk about how they apologise if a train arrives even a minute late, from now on I will smile (just a little bitterly), and think: "But Yakumo too is in Japan!"
The next morning I met up with my friend Mami, veteran companion of adventures in Gunma and Aomori in 2018 and 2019 (as recorded in this pages), who was to be my Hokkaido comrade. The plan was to interview a manga-ka that afternoon, then go to Kushiro in the east to check out When Marnie was There locations the next day, which - spoiler alert - is what in fact happened - but meanwhile we had a morning to kill, so we looked around Sapporo - sadly rather drizzly at the time. The city hall - famous for being made out of red brick, like Tokyo station (a rarity in Japan) was being renovated, but we had fun at the Tokeidai or Clock Tower Hall, a centre of education in Sapporo from way back - which, this being Hokkaido, means the latter half of the nineteenth century. (If you're not familiar with the history, Japan only really established itself in Hokkaido - then Ezo - at the end of the Edo era, displacing the native Ainu people. Comparisons with American expansion into native American lands happening at the same time are no doubt misleading, but not totally inappropriate.) Here, we were able to sit next to a rather handsy American educator, enjoy 'funny' Japanese, and most interestingly for me, be introduced by Mami to the genre of textbooks used in Japanese primary schools to teach doutoku (morality). These books are full of interesting thought experiments, which encourage Japanese people from a young age to think around situations, considering everyone's point of view, "reading the air", etc. I don't know if this is the kind of approach used in UK "citizenship" classes (which were long after my time), but from the name I assumed they were more about learning how to address a bishop. Tell me if I'm wrong!
So, that afternoon I finally (with Mami's interpreting help) managed to carry out an interview I'd been trying to arrange since before Coronavirus, with the manga-ka Kore Yamazaki, author of The Ancient Magus' Bride - a really fine fantasy manga set in the Cotswolds, and of interest to me on those grounds alone, even if it weren't also very good (which it is). Meeting manga-kas, especially ones who live in Hokkaido, isn't easy, as they're notoriously shy of publicity, but Yamazaki's publisher was very helpful, and so was her editor, and so - at last was Yamazaki herself, a very intelligent, very friendly woman of 34, who - having been introduced to British fantasy by the increasingly dubious medium of Harry Potter (for which she was the "right" age) has - I was delighted to hear - recently graduated to Diana Wynne Jones, and not just Howl's Moving Castle, either. She mentioned Dogsbody and Fire and Hemlock (under their Japanese names, of course) as particular favourites, which I think shows impeccable taste. Anyway, there were plenty of interesting things in the conversation, some of which will be making their way to my book in due course.
Coronavirus measures - a continuing series. For those interested in how Japan is handling matters, the hotels where we stayed not only had disinfectant at the entrance to the breakfast room, but also disposable plastic gloves to put on your already-disinfected hands while choosing items at the buffet. Once you sat down, there were signs imploring you to practise a policy of "moku shoku" - that is, silent eating.
The next day we journeyed east to Kushiro, whence we were to make the journey even further east the next day, by hired car. Kushiro is a small fishing town of about 25,000 people, and I don't think it would be too offended if I said that there wasn't as much to do there as in Sapporo. We wandered round a strange warehouse-like building called Moo (Moo-chan is the town's mascot, apparently - a little yellow sauropod), which had a few souvenir shops, one or two places to eat, and a number of areas that seemed to be under construction and/or of indeterminate purpose. It was almost empty, but here and there people were standing and sitting, almost like characters in Animal Crossing waiting to be accosted so that they could fill us in on the best place to find fossils, or whatever. We had a very filling meal of katsu curry omurice - a kind of amalgamation of several Japanese staples, but none the worse for that - and wandered round the harbour for a while before turning in by way of an izakaya.
Akkeshi and the Mochirippu Marsh the next day were very interesting, and my first chance to travel in Hokkaido by car. We went out by the coast road, and came back inland, through dairy-farm country (also home to the odd eldritch horror, as it turns out):
Akkeshi is reputed to be where Anna disembarks in Ghibli's version of When Marnie Was There, and you can certainly see a resemblance, though not an exact one, to the film:
Likewise, the marshes at Mochirippu are not a bad fit for the site of Marnie's house (although the house itself is said to be in Nagano):
There's a Gary Larson cartoon which shows a cow being rejected from a zoo for being "just too common." But of course, "common" is a relative term. There are many things about Hokkaido that seem very familiar to me - the greenery, the expanses of flat land, and of course the dairy farms - because this is exactly what I grew up with; but to most Japanese people they have the charm of the rare and exotic. Mami was excited to see dairy cows (mostly Fresians/Holsteins - can you tell the difference?) and the green green grass was magical to her - and of course, that lent it a new charm for me, too. (See also the red bricks of Sapporo city hall, above.) There was also a lot more visible wildlife than in Hampshire. Not that you never encounter deer there, or foxes, or even weasels (though not the big brown itachi of Hokkaido) in addition to your standard cows and horses, but seldom all within a half-hour drive, as we did yesterday.
Irises and Horses Go Together Well
Akkeshi: "Town of Cherry Blossom, Oysters and History" (in that order)
A Forlorn Young Fox
As for culinary firsts, I can recommend Akkeshi oysters, Genghis Khan (Hokkaido's own way of cooking lamb, an otherwise-rare meat in Japan) and mackerel sashimi - which goes off quickly, so can only easily be found near fishing ports where it can be served very fresh. I didn't get to eat Hokkaido ramen, which is famous, but it's good to keep something back in case there's a next time.
And that entry took me so long to write that by now I've arrive in Hanamaki in Iwate for the next leg of my adventure. (Mami went home today, so I'm solus for this bit.) I've checked into my ryokan, and am ready for sleep and Kenji Miyazawa on the morrow. Good night!
On Monday, I met up with Rei, my tenant in Bristol, who had come to Japan for a couple of weeks to introduce her fiance to her family. (He is a diplomat and has just been transferred from Bristol to Shanghai, so it was the only opportunity for a while.) Anyway, she and her father kindly took me to lunch at a very small tempura place near Jinbouchou, the bookshop district. It was the sort of restaurant with only room for 7 people, where the owner cooks everything before your wondering eyes, and has been doing so for the last 40 years. It was, of course, extremely good, but it was such an intimate establishment that I didn't feel able to be "that gaijin" and photograph it. Rei suffered no such inhibition, though, and found an angle that really brought out the celebrated Butler chin.
Afterwards we went to a second-hand children's bookshop, which was extremely interesting and may have resulted in one or two Shouwa-era purchases. (However, as I'm writing this in a Shinkansen speeding from Hakodate to Morioka I can't show you them.) We had planned to go up Tokyo tower as well, but already the weather in Tokyo, which has since become intolerably hot, was sufficiently unbearable to your correspondent.
Rei also took the chance to show me her alma mater, the imposing Meiji University:
Interesting language usage note. I mentioned to Rei and her father that I had recently received a ticket to the Nagoya sumo basho, which is on my schedule for 10th July (and very excited about it I am). I said "sumo chiketto" ("chiketto" being a common word for ticket, taken straight from English). This made Rei laugh out loud - because, apparently, the juxtaposition of such a quintessentially Japanese thing as sumo and the word "chiketto" was so odd. I asked what would have been a better choice - "kippu" (切符), perhaps? That would have been better, according to her father, but the best would have been "nyuujouken" (入場券). Something to remember for next time - along with my deafness to that kind of error.
The next day I went to Sapporo by shinkansen. Or rather, I went as far as Hakodate (Hokkaido's second city) by shinkansen, after which it was a case of transferring to a limited express (emphasis very much on the first word) for the last leg. It was scheduled as a three and a half hour journey, having travelled the length of Honshu from Tokyo to Hakodate in only about four. I was quite surprised that there's no shinkansen link to what is, after all, the largest Japanese city north of Tokyo, but apparently one will be coming in about a decade, so watch out for that.
I enjoyed the first part of the journey, including a cheeky chicken bento, made the transfer okay and had travelled about an hour of the leg to Sapporo, before grinding to a halt in a small place called Yakumo (which means "Eight Clouds", and it is well named). It was raining, and apparently there was some concern about the track between there and the next stop. This was quite odd, I thought; given that Hokkaido goes for several months of the year under a metre or so of snow (Sapporo has a famous snow sculpture festival), could they really be stopped by a bit of rain?
Yakumo Days
Over the next few hours I was to learn that the answer was an emphatic Yes. I got to know Yakumo station well, as day turned into night. By way of sustenance they did distribute a bottle of water and a small packet of "Calorie Mate" (chocolate flavour) but it felt pretty inadequate. (For scale, this box is about three inches long.)
It took them more than six hours to lay on a bus as far as the next station some thirty miles away ("daikou basu" is Japanese for "rail replacement service," I now know), whence we eventually proceeded to Sapporo. I should have got there by 5.30pm; I eventually arrived at 1.40am. Luckily my hotel was in walking distance, as there were no taxis by then, either.
So, when people praise Japanese public transport in Tokyo, and talk about how they apologise if a train arrives even a minute late, from now on I will smile (just a little bitterly), and think: "But Yakumo too is in Japan!"
The next morning I met up with my friend Mami, veteran companion of adventures in Gunma and Aomori in 2018 and 2019 (as recorded in this pages), who was to be my Hokkaido comrade. The plan was to interview a manga-ka that afternoon, then go to Kushiro in the east to check out When Marnie was There locations the next day, which - spoiler alert - is what in fact happened - but meanwhile we had a morning to kill, so we looked around Sapporo - sadly rather drizzly at the time. The city hall - famous for being made out of red brick, like Tokyo station (a rarity in Japan) was being renovated, but we had fun at the Tokeidai or Clock Tower Hall, a centre of education in Sapporo from way back - which, this being Hokkaido, means the latter half of the nineteenth century. (If you're not familiar with the history, Japan only really established itself in Hokkaido - then Ezo - at the end of the Edo era, displacing the native Ainu people. Comparisons with American expansion into native American lands happening at the same time are no doubt misleading, but not totally inappropriate.) Here, we were able to sit next to a rather handsy American educator, enjoy 'funny' Japanese, and most interestingly for me, be introduced by Mami to the genre of textbooks used in Japanese primary schools to teach doutoku (morality). These books are full of interesting thought experiments, which encourage Japanese people from a young age to think around situations, considering everyone's point of view, "reading the air", etc. I don't know if this is the kind of approach used in UK "citizenship" classes (which were long after my time), but from the name I assumed they were more about learning how to address a bishop. Tell me if I'm wrong!
So, that afternoon I finally (with Mami's interpreting help) managed to carry out an interview I'd been trying to arrange since before Coronavirus, with the manga-ka Kore Yamazaki, author of The Ancient Magus' Bride - a really fine fantasy manga set in the Cotswolds, and of interest to me on those grounds alone, even if it weren't also very good (which it is). Meeting manga-kas, especially ones who live in Hokkaido, isn't easy, as they're notoriously shy of publicity, but Yamazaki's publisher was very helpful, and so was her editor, and so - at last was Yamazaki herself, a very intelligent, very friendly woman of 34, who - having been introduced to British fantasy by the increasingly dubious medium of Harry Potter (for which she was the "right" age) has - I was delighted to hear - recently graduated to Diana Wynne Jones, and not just Howl's Moving Castle, either. She mentioned Dogsbody and Fire and Hemlock (under their Japanese names, of course) as particular favourites, which I think shows impeccable taste. Anyway, there were plenty of interesting things in the conversation, some of which will be making their way to my book in due course.
Coronavirus measures - a continuing series. For those interested in how Japan is handling matters, the hotels where we stayed not only had disinfectant at the entrance to the breakfast room, but also disposable plastic gloves to put on your already-disinfected hands while choosing items at the buffet. Once you sat down, there were signs imploring you to practise a policy of "moku shoku" - that is, silent eating.
The next day we journeyed east to Kushiro, whence we were to make the journey even further east the next day, by hired car. Kushiro is a small fishing town of about 25,000 people, and I don't think it would be too offended if I said that there wasn't as much to do there as in Sapporo. We wandered round a strange warehouse-like building called Moo (Moo-chan is the town's mascot, apparently - a little yellow sauropod), which had a few souvenir shops, one or two places to eat, and a number of areas that seemed to be under construction and/or of indeterminate purpose. It was almost empty, but here and there people were standing and sitting, almost like characters in Animal Crossing waiting to be accosted so that they could fill us in on the best place to find fossils, or whatever. We had a very filling meal of katsu curry omurice - a kind of amalgamation of several Japanese staples, but none the worse for that - and wandered round the harbour for a while before turning in by way of an izakaya.
Akkeshi and the Mochirippu Marsh the next day were very interesting, and my first chance to travel in Hokkaido by car. We went out by the coast road, and came back inland, through dairy-farm country (also home to the odd eldritch horror, as it turns out):
Akkeshi is reputed to be where Anna disembarks in Ghibli's version of When Marnie Was There, and you can certainly see a resemblance, though not an exact one, to the film:
Likewise, the marshes at Mochirippu are not a bad fit for the site of Marnie's house (although the house itself is said to be in Nagano):
There's a Gary Larson cartoon which shows a cow being rejected from a zoo for being "just too common." But of course, "common" is a relative term. There are many things about Hokkaido that seem very familiar to me - the greenery, the expanses of flat land, and of course the dairy farms - because this is exactly what I grew up with; but to most Japanese people they have the charm of the rare and exotic. Mami was excited to see dairy cows (mostly Fresians/Holsteins - can you tell the difference?) and the green green grass was magical to her - and of course, that lent it a new charm for me, too. (See also the red bricks of Sapporo city hall, above.) There was also a lot more visible wildlife than in Hampshire. Not that you never encounter deer there, or foxes, or even weasels (though not the big brown itachi of Hokkaido) in addition to your standard cows and horses, but seldom all within a half-hour drive, as we did yesterday.
Irises and Horses Go Together Well
Akkeshi: "Town of Cherry Blossom, Oysters and History" (in that order)
A Forlorn Young Fox
As for culinary firsts, I can recommend Akkeshi oysters, Genghis Khan (Hokkaido's own way of cooking lamb, an otherwise-rare meat in Japan) and mackerel sashimi - which goes off quickly, so can only easily be found near fishing ports where it can be served very fresh. I didn't get to eat Hokkaido ramen, which is famous, but it's good to keep something back in case there's a next time.
And that entry took me so long to write that by now I've arrive in Hanamaki in Iwate for the next leg of my adventure. (Mami went home today, so I'm solus for this bit.) I've checked into my ryokan, and am ready for sleep and Kenji Miyazawa on the morrow. Good night!
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-02 09:12 pm (UTC)May I ask--the mackerel sushi, was it saba, aji, or something else?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-02 10:22 pm (UTC)It was saba.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-07-03 12:33 am (UTC)