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Beginning of the end
That’s possibly a bit unnecessarily alarmist but with just three and a half months to go we’re now getting to the business end of the season, as they like to say in sport, which means we’re getting into Last Time territory.
And last weekend was our first proper Last Time, if you get my meaning, because we took what will surely be our last visit to Niimi for the foreseeable future. Niimi is a tiny village tucked away up in the mountains of central Japan, about two hours away from our place, that we’ve visited a few times over the last 20 months to catch up with our friends and surrogate parents, who are the actual parents of Hironori (nickname: Sweden), the guitarist I played with in Tokyo 20 years ago who now lives in France.
We’ve also become good friends with Sweden’s cousin Yumi and her two daughters, who live in nearby Okayama and always pop up to Niimi when we’re in town. And so it was on this occasion that we caught up with them too, starting with a visit to their local fun park called Highland in a place called Kojima, which is on the edge of Japan just where the Seto-Ohashi, one of the biggest or longest or somethingest bridges in the world in space, takes off on its long journey over to the island of Shikoku. We took the kids out of school for a day, which meant that the fun park was blissfully empty and there was no waiting time for any of the rides.
Highland is one of those faded and rusting old theme parks that clearly hasn’t changed (or even had a lick of paint) since the grand old days of the 70s when the Japanese economy was seemingly unstoppable. The roller coaster in particular gave every impression that it might happily fall apart at any moment, especially the loop-the-loop bit.
But the scariest ride of all was the sky bicycles, which really do look as if they are about to fall off the rails.
Too scared to admire the view; just keep pedalling!
Perhaps it’s because there’s no machinery to drag you up the slope or around the track; you’re really on your own out there.
Felix, meanwhile, was all set to do the bungy jump when the attendant announced that it was too windy, so he had to settle for second-best on the frankly quite terrifying gravity drop ride. Here he is the second time around with his new best friends that he met at the bungy jump office:
Here’s a commemorative photo with some of the Okayama gang, including Mrs. K on the right:
The next day, we went to a nice town nearby called Kurashiki. In the underground car park at Kurashiki, the machine really spits out the tickets. It’s official:
Kurashiki has a lovely Old Bit by the canal:
Although you can’t really see it in the photo, there are lots of highly cultural old buildings along the canal and in the streets behind. It really is a very lovely spot.
Then we headed off to go visit a bit of Culture in the form of a five-storied thingie. We had to park the car on one side of the road and then cross over to the other side and go through the rice fields (look how high the rice is! Must be harvest time soon) to get to the Culture, which was very pleasant.
Eleni bribed Felix to sit nicely for a photo by offering him use of the camera for ten minutes, during which time he managed to snap about 40 photos, but I sneakily whittled them down to just a few, including this arty one:
The kids really enjoyed the culture:
Then we headed up to Niimi, where it’s grape season right now. If you’re a tall foreigner you have to pick the grapes while stumbling around beneath the bird netting:
Here Eleni relaxes with Yumi outside the grape field after a hard morning’s picking:
We ended up taking home about 25 bunches of grapes. Only a few of these were for us; the rest were presents for various people, just about everybody we know in fact, because in Japan it’s poor form to go anywhere without bringing back gifts. Sometimes this can be annoying (and expensive) but you do get a warm rosy feeling inside as you go around dispensing freshly picked grapes to all and sundry, and of course over the last 20 months we have enjoyed countless gifts from the self-same friends so a bit of quid pro quo is definitely in order.
Niimi is so quiet and peaceful that much of what happens involves just sitting around chatting. Here, Felix practices his acrobatics on the road outside the grape field with the endlessly obliging Yu, husband of Etsuko, sister of Yumi, cousin of Sweden, who lives in France. Small world isn’t it?
We had to leave Niimi at lunchtime in order to race back to Sunami for a special festival at the local shrine in the evening. Though small in scale it was rather elaborate, with dancing and chanting and musical performance and a procession involving a dragon or two.
Fires in baskets are always good for atmos:
Here’s Felix blowing the ancient traditional conch alongside the village elders:
Naturally, Eleni’s drumming group got a guernsey as always:
So that was a pretty full-on long weekend, but there’s precious little time left now for these sorts of shenanigans, and what with soccer and band commitments we have only a few weekends available to us until December. I can sense the end of our journey, and though on the one hand I feel sad that we didn’t get around to doing everything that we wanted to, on the other hand I feel satisfied that we’ve covered a fair bit of ground and had lots of fun in the process.
Or perhaps that’s just a pathetic justification: in truth, I can’t really be bothered. Summer has worn me out.
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Shimanami Island Ride
On Sunday I rode 120 kilometres on my bike. And as you might imagine, I’m pretty proud of myself.
I’m also a broken man: my neck hurts, my right knee is killing me, some of my fingers have gone numb, my bottom is saddle-sore, and my lower legs have taken on a life of their own, the muscles jumping around like crazy so that it looks as if there’s a bunch of aliens in there waiting to burst out.
However it was all worth it. The scenery was spectacular and though a typhoon had brought heavy rain the day before, the skies magically cleared and it was a very pleasant day for a ride, notwithstanding the 90% humidity.
The Shimanami Island Ride is an annual event that goes across our local island chain, starting at Mukaijima (the island next to the mainland) and continuing across all six islands right through to Imabari on the huge island of Shikoku. Unfortunately I only found out about it last year after the event, so to speak, so I was determined to do it this year.
There were four courses to choose from: the 190 km one was obviously intended for hard-core cyclists (containing a deliberately high quotient of hills) and was immediately out of contention; then there was 140 km, 100 km and 80 km. The 80 km one was obviously for wimps so I chose the super rugged 100 km course. Well over a thousand riders took part but we were all spread out to prevent unruly jostling and there was no congestion to speak of. The ride followed normal roads, but although we were nominally competing with the traffic, there’s very little happening on the islands on a Sunday so it was all very peaceful and convivial.
All the bridges have been built with special bike lanes and even little bicycle-only approach paths that are not at all steep (except when you’ve done 50 km or so; then they become horribly steep). The bridges were the highlights in fact because of the views as you cycle along and the cooling breeze high up in the air. And I learned an important Bridge Fact: suspension bridges are not perfectly flat, they go down a bit after the middle, which is rather lovely when you’re at that stage when you can’t be bothered pedalling.
In retrospect I should have chosen the wimpy 80 km course, because I discovered at the 45 km mark that I hadn’t read the fine print (in the form of altitude maps kindly provided for each course) and they had in fact snuck a few hills into the 100 km course. Curses!
Anyway here are some photos.
Here I am before the start, with no idea of the cruel surprise that was about to be sprung upon me in 45 km.
A quick pitstop at the second bridge, still blissfully unaware of the evil hills that await.
After the half-way point (did I mention the hills?) I was decidedly less enthused with the scenery and the ride was possibly even starting to become a bit of a slog. However I’d arranged to meet Eleni and Felix at Dolce, a rather excellent gelato shop on the island of Ikuchijima (which we regard as our local island since it’s serviced by the ferry that leaves from Sunami), so I resolved to at least make it that far. By the time I finally got there I was ready to squib out of the last bit of the race and just catch the ferry home with the others, but the fortifying effects of a double gelato plus some motivational input from Eleni was enough to get me over the line, and off I went once more. And although the last 20 km or so were a struggle, there was some consolation in the form of the occasional discovery along the way, such as this interesting shop:
I wonder what they do in there? And why are the windows boarded up?
So I made it to the end, yay. It was more exercise than I’ve ever done in my life but it was definitely a good experience, and hopefully the sensation will return to my fingers before too long and I should get movement back in my neck some day soon and with any luck the aliens will stop dancing in my legs and I’m sure my bottom will have recovered in time for next year.
Meanwhile, here are some random photos for no reason.
The other day we spotted this sign while out driving.
I think it’s something to do with books, or at least I certainly hope it is.
Also, a couple of weeks back Ruby was awarded a Gold Tag for her summer science project on salt, and it was on display down at the municipal offices so we all trooped down to have a look.
Found it!
And look, the gold tag and everything!
A couple of weeks back, I took the kids down to a local restaurant/cafe place (Eleni being slightly unwell that evening) where a couple of the guys from our brass band were playing an impromptu gig just set up in the corner. And I thought to myself, what a lovely thing to do. So I took a quick snap on my phone. Excuse the low quality.
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End of the hols
A strange and eerie calm has descended upon the Sushi on a Stick household… yes, the little darlings are ensconced in their respective institutions of learning for the first time in over a month, and peace reigns once more between the hours of 8 am and 4 pm.
In Ruby’s case, the school holidays actually finished last Monday, when work experience started. (Of course the school couldn’t possibly countenance giving the students time off for work experience, so they shave a week off the holidays instead.) She spent a productive five days at an architectural design company playing with CAD all day, and ended up with a rather nice floor plan of her very own house design, along with a cute little cardboard model complete with grass and trees and tiny little paper figurines (one of them sitting on the toilet even).
Here in Japan, you don’t find your own work experience and contact the school; rather, the school draws up a list of places that have agreed to take on students and you have to choose what you want to do. These are typically uninspired options such as the local 7-11, the local petrol station and a cleaning company, although they do have a few more interesting ones too. Ruby’s preferred option was the nice Italian restaurant down by the beach, called Zona Fortunato (Italian scholars will note the error), and I have to say that this would have been pretty good because (a) the hours were only 11 to 3; (b) she might have learned something about cooking; (c) it was 10 minutes walk from home and (d) we could have come down for a meal to embarrass her in action. But on the other hand, she has often talked about wanting to be an architect someday, and it sounds like the design firm was fun, notwithstanding the 8:10 am starts. And I figure she can always work in a cafe when she’s older, and we’ll come and embarrass her there instead.
You know how I said we were definitely going to see the Pirates ‘n’ Fire festival on Saturday night? Yep, you guessed it… we piked out. It was just too hot and, after all the fun and excitement of the summer, I just couldn’t muster up the energy for yet another trip to a distant beach with an hour’s drive home and another late night, especially as we had to front up to a working bee at the primary school on Sunday morning at 8 a.m. sharp, plus the kids and I had a concert on that day. So, another culture fail to add to the list. After all, we went last year (you can read about it here) and it was fantastic fun and at least we can say we’ve seen it and everything and… enough already.
Even though we didn’t make it to P&F, though, I was rather pleased with myself for discovering a new island, a new beach and even a new cafe on Saturday. Ruby had soccer practice starting at 4:30 in the afternoon at her regular ground which is about an hour away (lots ‘o’ driving… it’s part and parcel of country life) and I had two hours to kill so I decided to take the opportunity to explore a nearby island that was marked on the map. Turns out it even had a beach, although by the time I arrived the beach was officially “closed”, in the sense that the music had been turned off and I didn’t have to pay ¥1000 ($10) to drive in. However the water was still very much there, so I went for a nice swim on a totally deserted beach. Though I did feel a bit of trepidation as I stepped into the water, mainly because I was half expecting to be told off at any moment for Swimming Out of Hours.
(Once back in the Tokyo days, Eleni and I went down to Okinawa for a holiday and we found a lovely deserted beach just near our hotel. But no sooner had we stepped into the crystal clear water than a man raced up on a beach bike shouting at us to get out. It turned out that the hotel which owned that patch of beach was closed for redevelopment and therefore the beach was officially off limits. I tried to protest that the ocean is not private property and people can choose to enter it where they like but he was having none of it and kept carrying on making so much noise that eventually we up and left. We ended up at another “properly supervised” beach with music screaming out the speakers all day long.)
Back on topic, here’s the beach I discovered on Saturday:
Happily I was able to swim undisturbed (certainly by other swimmers) and even buy an ice-cream from one of the stores, which strangely was still open for business despite the beach being closed. Clearly they haven’t read the rules.
On the way back I tracked down a lovely cafe clinging improbably to the side of the hill with the most stunning views from the outdoor tables. Tragically the coffee was disgusting but it was worth it for the island vista spread out in the setting sun:
And readers will be pleased to know that we managed to make it to a festival on the Saturday night anyway, the one put on by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the big factory complex on the way into town. We went last year and I wrote about it on this page, so I won’t go on about it here other than to say that it was another one of those wonderful sea-of-humanity events with thousands of people wandering around and many of the girls dressed up in yukatas and millions of stalls and a big stage down one end and, to finish off the night, a fireworks show, bringing the fireworks count for 2011 up to five.
On Sunday the kids and I did another concert with the PJO band, with Eleni offering moral support from the audience and taking millions of photos. Here is a selection.
Felix ensconced in the trumpet section:
Our band leader Habu-sensei (Mr. Habu to you) has taken a shine to Felix and often gets him up on stage for an interview. I love it because it’s the only time (other than when he had to introduce himself for the first time at the local primary school) where I ever get to see Felix looking nervous and subdued.
Ruby and Felix between them have an embarrassing number of solos. Ruby even has an entire song (the theme from Ice Castles, if you must know; a soppy ballad but it’s not too bad considering) where she gets to stand out the front and get closer to her adoring fans:
Eleni the photographer got a bit arty at one stage and started shooting in black and white:
And finally, yours truly up the back pumping out those bass licks. (How’s the look on Felix’s face — I think he was doing a high note.)
Another crazy action-packed weekend, in other words. Ruby was back at school on Monday morning; Felix had a few more days of freedom but now he too is back inside the hallowed walls of learning and I have time to write posts (at least, that’s my excuse for the pitiful lack of postage during August; pretty poor form to blame it on the kids, I know, but that’s what they’re there for).
And now all we need is for the hot and humid weather to finally go away and leave us alone so that normal programming can resume in earnest.
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Summer report
Gosh, summer is nearly over. And what a summer it’s been. This year we sensibly decided to think local, act local rather than traipsing around the country exhausting ourselves like we did last year. So we’ve been traipsing around the nearby vicinity exhausting ourselves instead.
And it’s been tons of fun. By my calculations we’ve set foot on seven new islands (and driven across countless others in the process), discovered three excellent new beaches, checked out four separate fireworks shows; and we’re not finished yet, with the Pirates ‘n’ Fire Festival still to come on 27 August. That’s apart from all the regular going down the local beach stuff and the kids attending various soccer training camps and Felix going off to Skool Camp and doing wholesome school holiday activities in town. Felix has also been zooming around the neighbourhood on his bike visiting friends (especially Ryota up the road, who has a Wii — not that this has anything to do with the friendship), while Ruby has organised days out with no less than three friends: one from school (two years ahead of her; not from her current group of classmates, who are a total loss), one from PJO brass band and Rio from the soccer club, the one who came with us to the Katy Perry concert in May. In fact it’s been so full-on that we still haven’t made it down to the beach to let off the huge pack of fireworks we bought a couple of months back. Can you believe that?
Needless to say I can’t possibly do justice to all the Fun that’s been Had, so I’ll just whip through the highlights. Better get comfortable, this may take a while.
Summer officially started with the beach opening ceremony on July 2, which I’ve already covered here.
The following week the Nishiharas invited us down to the island of Omishima (hereby designated as our first island visit of the summer) to visit a culturally important shrine of some sort. It was a very nice thing to do on such a stinking hot day, on account of all the lovely shady trees in the grounds of the shrine. Felix got hold of the camera and managed to take 140 photos, which I cruelly forced him to whittle down to just 20. The poor thing, he still lives in a world where cash flows infinitely forth from the ATM and no digital photos are ever deleted. Clearly I need to work harder on robbing him of the innocence of childhood.
The shady spots were possibly my favourite parts of the shrine:
Eleni has fallen in with the rather quaint Japanese tradition of strolling around under a parasol (ladies only, obviously):
There was loads of cultural stuff there:
This photo looks overexposed but I think it illustrates the intensity of the Japanese summer quite nicely:
One of Felix’s six million architectural shots:
I managed to wrest the camera from his grasp at one point (that’s Mr Nishihara by the way):
And lastly, a shot of Mummy with a large propeller. Of course.
The next weekend we were off again, this time with our family friends the Hiranos for an overnight stay at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring town in the city of Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. The trip to Matsuyama involved crossing no less than six islands, thus bringing the cumulative Island Count to seven.
Poor Ruby was away at a soccer camp that weekend and we did feel rather guilty when we stopped at a pool the first day in a city along the way (I forget where; Yusuke was navigating). It had a slide and one of those walking circuit thingies so beloved of Japanese public pools everywhere, where the water flows along and sort of pushes you around as you walk or just sit in a floaty ring. This one had the added attraction that the circuit goes inside the building at the back and then back out again.
Here’s Felix testing out the design capacity of the floaty ring with the Hirano kids:
Meanwhile the Ladies sat in the pool chatting:
Next we headed over to check out the handome onsen building at Dogo Onsen. And what a fine building it is indeed:
Even more so at night:
Up a side alley we spotted an ancient traditional shooting gallery and stopped to let the kids give full reign to their destructive urges.
Felix didn’t manage to shoot enough Kewpie dolls to win anything but he made up for it by ingratiating himself with some drunken office workers with excellent aim who’d come along afterwards and convincing them to hand over their prizes since they didn’t need a few toy guns anyway. He’s going to go far that boy.
The hotel was pretty ordinary but the brekky was good:
For the second day we ambled around town and eventually stumbled on a cafe serving rather good parfaits. Eleni has always maintained that Japan does really good parfaits but sadly we’ve hardly had any in over a year and a half. So we made up for it by treating the kids, and I generously offered to help Felix out at regular intervals since he clearly couldn’t manage that much ice-cream on his own:
Fast-forwarding now through various soccer camps, the spectacularly successful fishing trip with Mr. Nishimura and my epic shrine-carrying efforts (described in lovingly painstaking detail on this page), we get to the day Daddy insisted on dragging the family off on a mid-week adventure to yet another island chain, this one about an hour down the road, which had been recommended by several different groups of friends so I really thought we should see it and there’s only four months left and we have to get out and do these sorts of things or we’ll miss out and we’re probably never coming back this way or not for many years at least etc etc etc etc.
We set off with only vague plans to find a beach somewhere and go for a swim and, in that wonderfully fortuitous way that seems to happen when you’re on the islands, we stumbled on possibly our Best Beach Ever, even nicer than the one where we swam at Kosagijima after our fishing heroics. And the reason it was so nice was that there WASN’T ANY CONCRETE. Well, there was a short section up to the left but if you looked the other way you could pretend that the beach was 100% natural, which is an absolute rarity in Japan, a country in love with concrete, where virtually every metre of coastline (and every inland river, for that matter) has been fully concreted, supposedly for protection against natural disasters (tsunami, river flooding) which certainly do happen although I think we all know the real reason is to win votes from the powerful construction companies. Tragically for the construction companies, there’s pretty much nothing left in the country to concrete any more. Unless they start on the beaches.
Unfortunately not many photos were taken but here’s a nice one of Ruby in her new Beach Hoodie. Since she’s a teenager we thought we’d better buy her a hoodie so she can hang out in shopping centers, but this one has the added advantage that you can go swimming in it and avoid having to put on annoying sunscreen. What a good idea!
After an exhausting day at the beach we were all tired and ready to go home. So of course Daddy insisted that we all go a few more islands along to visit an accredited old preserved bit of town that I’d heard about from someone somewhere. The kids were thrilled with the idea:
Especially when we piled out of the car and started wandering around the Old Township and they were forced to pose for random photos:
Still, it was rather nice, what we saw of it:
Unfortunately most things were closed (including a very tempting cafe facing the sea) because Tuesday is the day off, which we didn’t know, so we’re going to come back again some time for another visit, and kids, as you can imagine, are thrilled with the prospect. They just love Culture and Old Things. By the way, we crossed another five islands that day, bringing the Island Count to 12.
On the weekend Ruby had a barbeque with her soccer team (and coach) at Sunset Beach, a rusted and fading but still serviceable beach resort on the island of Ikuchijima, the one that’s just a short ferry-ride from our place. So Eleni, Felix and I took the opportunity to go down to Innoshima, the next island along, to check out the practice sessions for the boat races that take place as part of the Pirate ‘n’ Fire festival at the end of August. They row these long thin boats called “koyaha” that apparently were favoured by pirates because they could zoom out to the ships before the poor unsuspecting victims had time to react. Here you can see some of the boat teams rowing madly across in the background while Felix checks out his foot at the water’s edge:
Tragically we won’t be able to attend the boat races because there is a PJO concert on the very same day. But as it turns out you can have a go yourself at rowing a pirate boats on the practice days. We thought this was an excellent consolation prize.
Plus you get to pose for the obligatory commemorative photo:
Island Count = 14, New Beach Count = two.
Last week was a huge weekend for culture. On the Saturday night was the Yassa Odori festival, where about eighty or so teams from the local area battle it out for the honour of putting on the best performance of the Yassa Odori dance, an ancient traditional form of dance that is only performed in Mihara or so the literature will tell you. We went to this last year and I wrote a comprehensive report including videos and photos of the wacky decorated trucks and colourful costumes so I won’t bother with more photos here.
Suffice to say that this year it was a far more meaningful event because Eleni, Ruby and Felix were all dancing in Team No. 63. (I managed to worm my way out of it by claiming official photographer status.) All the teams had to dance past the official judging panel, which included two Miss Yassa dressed up like air hostesses from the 60s (you can just see them down the end):
They had to go to practice sessions for several weeks beforehand and then dance for hours on the night itself and were thoroughly worn out by the end, though culturally stimulated. Eleni won the Best Smile prize for her team and got to dance in the special Best Smile On the Night parade at the end, though tragically she didn’t get to take out the big one.
I’ve posted a video further below for your viewing pleasure.
Sunday night was the local festival for Sunami Heights, which is our particular area of Sunami, which is our particular section of Mihara. In other words, a very local event involving a few hundred people at most. One of the lovely things about summer festivals is the number of young girls (generally up to age 30) who seize the opportunity to get dolled up in their summer yukata (lightweight kimono) and wooden sandals for the event. Ruby was likewise keen to get into the action so we found a yukata at the local shopping centre and arranged for a special hairdo for the evening. The teenager was so impressed with the makeover that she took hundreds of photos in the kitchen before setting out:
I was working at one of the stalls for the first hour but managed to nick out for a moment to photograph the teenager parading around in all her glory:
And here we are a bit later, in a more natural pose. Ruby has recently embraced mobile phone emailing, the equivalent of SMS in Japan, and is now almost constantly wedded to her screen.
Eleni’s drumming troupe, as always, got a guernsey:
And young Felix was commandeered to play the horagai, an ancient traditional cultural conch shell, in one of the songs. Being an accomplished trumpeter now, he gets quite a good sound out of it, which is no mean feat.
The kids also did a bit of dancing, with some of them taking it more seriously than others:
Tragically the powers that be had very stupidly organised the Sunami Heights festival on the very same evening as the Mihara fireworks, which I for one was not going to miss for the world, so we had to leave the festival early and miss out on much of the dancing and general merriment. As soon as Felix’s “dancing” was over, we piled into the car for the mad dash across town and, although we were about 15 minutes late, for some reason the fireworks were also delayed so we got there with impeccable timing, just as the first ones went off. Clearly the God of Public Events Management was smiling upon us that night.
Here’s some video from that weekend.
And finally, to wrap things up, our friend Miyuki from Nagoya came to stay so we zoomed over to the lovely old well-preserved fishing town of Tomonoura and had a highly convivial lunch at a cafe overlooking the harbour.
Then we wandered around the shops a bit, and Ruby took the opportunity to send off another 100000000 emails.
Then on whim we caught a five-minute ferry across to yet another new island, which turned out to have a wonderful beach on it (also no concrete) from which you can actually swim across to the next island because it’s THAT CLOSE. Definitely a new experience for the Sushi on a Stick household and another contender for Best Beach Ever.
Island count = 16, new beach count = three.
Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get any photos because we were in a tearing hurry to get to our next engagement, a fireworks show at Fukuyama, which promised some 10,000 fireworks. They always like to boast about how many fireworks are in the show. Thus the Fukuyama fireworks promised to be our biggest to date. The firework count was well ahead of 6,000 at Mihara and 1,500 at Innoshima, and though I had thought at the time these were ample, the Fukuyama ones were really something else. There were times when it seemed that the whole sky was ablaze and even a bitter old cynic like me couldn’t help but let out the odd “ooh!” and “ah!”. (Yes, with exclamation marks too.) Although I would say about the Mihara ones that every explosion echoed around the nearby mountains for about ten seconds, creating this continuous rumbling effect like a train going past or an approaching thunderstorm, and that was pretty impressive. But the Fukuyama ones were easily the best we’ve seen, plus the fact that so many people were dressed up in their yukatas and the sea-of-humanity factor with everyone enjoying themselves by the river.
So it’s been an amazing summer, but one can now sense it coming to an end. For a start, the temperature is finally winding down; Mother Nature has finally relented, and not a moment too soon. This weekend we’re going to take it easy; tomorrow I’ve got soccer duty and Eleni is teaching, and on Sunday we’ve got a clean-up day at Ruby’s school followed by band practice, so it looks like a festival-free weekend for a change. Next week Ruby has work experience — during the school holidays, of course, the school couldn’t possibly let them go for a week during term time — and Felix has one of those random go-to-school-during-the-holidays days.
Then school goes back in earnest at the end of August and normal programming resumes. And with any luck we’ll find some time over the next week to go down the beach and let off that big bag of fireworks.
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Weekend wrap
What an amazing weekend.
It all started with some good news on Friday, courtesy of the long-range weather forecast that comes out every Friday afternoon, that the week after next is expected to be slightly cooler. Only slightly, mind, but anything’s welcome during the long hot sticky relentless Japanese summer. Actually it hasn’t been too bad this year. The other day a nice big windy typhoon came along and kept me up all night what with the carport roof flapping and the whistling through the cracks, but at least it was a bit of a change.
On Saturday Felix, Eleni and I (Ruby tragically was away on a three-day soccer training camp) went fishing with a very nice man called Mr Yoshimura, a retired fireman who has a little fishing boat. I’d mentioned to Mrs. Yoshida, who we know well because she’s the mother of one of Felix’s classmates and also a member of Eleni’s drumming group, that I really wanted to go out on a boat one day and did she by any chance know anyone with a boat? The squeaky wheel gets the grease as they say, and so it was that at 7:30 on Saturday morning we were down at the Sunami docks stepping out on our latest big adventure.
Here’s Mr. Yoshimura at the helm as we zoom out into the Seto Inland Sea. (Incidentally the primary school is the background there somewhere.)
The view from the boat was superb:
Here’s another view, where you can see the onsen (hot springs) building to the left and even our house, although I’m not going to point it out exactly because you might come and rob us:
I actually told Mr. Y that I wasn’t much of a fisherman and that I just wanted to go out on a boat for the views, but he was adamant that we all have a go. And I’m glad he did because it was actually good fun and we all managed to catch fish, despite being rank amateurs.
Here’s Felix with the first catch of the day:
(There’s a fish there, trust me. It’s in front of his shirt.)
And here Felix models a double-catch (ie two fish at the same time) by yours truly. The lines have two hooks on them; the top one is meant to be a lure or something, but if the fish insists on launching itself onto the wrong hook who am I to argue?
Eleni got right into it too, especially after she caught a double of her own.
This is a typical Sunami fishing boat, with a nice roof over the top so you don’t get sunburnt and a dinky little cultural sail at the back:
Sadly ours didn’t have a roof — Mr. Y doesn’t believe in them — but we were well prepared with hats and sunscreen and loads of drinks.
In the end Felix reckons he caught the most (of course) with 11, while Eleni and I chipped in with about seven or eight each. All in all we caught about 30 fish which we transferred into little esky like this.
After the fishing we landed on a tiny island called Kosagi-jima that has about 50 houses on it, one of which belongs to a friend of Mr. Y who doesn’t live there any more but is happy for people to plop down there for a break after a hard morning’s fishing. So we sat around the table and ate our sandwiches and onigiri rice snacks that we’d cleverly packed for the trip, and then we had the most wonderful swim at the beach right in front of the house, which was totally deserted and much cleaner and nicer than any beach we’ve seen thus far. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was the finest swim I’ve had in ages. You don’t normally associate Japan with pristine beaches and sparkling blue water and cute little islands, but yesterday just proved that such stuff does exist, at least around here.
Here’s another photo of the view on the way back. Sorry, I can’t help it.
The fishing trip was deemed a great success and we took home our haul of 30 fishes and divided it up biblically with friends and neighbours, minus the loaves I suppose.
That night we went and saw a fireworks display on the island of Innoshima. This is part of the month-long Pirate ‘n’ Fire Festival, which we went to last year and loved so much we vowed to come back and do it again this year. We went with the Yoshidas, who joined up on the spur of the moment when we delivered some fish to them. We had to put our cars on the ferry from Sunami to Ikuchi-jima (which is always fun; there’s something inherently lovely about catching the ferry, not least the cool breeze during summer), then hop over on the bridge (the one that Eleni and I rode across a few months back) to Innoshima. The place was packed and we nearly didn’t get a park but it all worked out in the end and we bumped into another family from school so we all got to sit there and ooh and aah for half an hour. The display was described by our friends as being on the small side, having “only” 1,500 fireworks in it, but to my mind half an hour of solid fireworks is plenty. Those big bangs are so terribly loud to my sensitive ears, don’t you know.
So that was Saturday. Then on Sunday I was out being cultural, having agreed to help carry around a portable wooden shrine called a mikoshi (which houses the god of the local neighbourhood) for some sort of annual ceremony. I’d actually been co-opted into this last year and found it to be back-breaking work but they made me promise to come back this year and I’d been dreading it since the moment the official “invitation” arrived, but it turned out to be not as bad as I’d feared (thus validating my belief that you should always lower your expectations so that you can be pleasantly surprised afterwards). All in all I think I made a decent contribution, putting in quite a bit of haulage including up a rather steep hill at one point.
First we met up at the local community centre and the Head Guy explained the shrine-carrying protocols:
Now the Japanese as we know don’t do things by halves, and when they’re in party mode they like to drink hard too. So at 7:30 in the morning I found myself holding a full cup of sake and a tiny plate of pickles, presumably as fortification for the task ahead. There were about 20 of us there (all guys) plus six high school boys who’d somehow been commandeered to lend a hand. I was surprised to hear the Head Guy telling them they were permitted to drink beers too and that we were all to turn a blind eye for the day. (The legal drinking age in Japan is 20.) Just shows that rules are made to be broken.
The mikoshi has a couple of kids on it (Felix’s classmates, as it turns out):
Finally we set off down the mountain towards the beach:
Every few hundred metres there’d be a rest break at somebody’s house where beers would magically appear and we’d all sit around theatrically wiping our brows and complimenting ourselves on our efforts:
Sometimes there’d be a rest break for no apparent reason, like this one just before the lights on the main road. Not that the gods care about earthly traffic signals.
We even stopped at the combined police/fire station. The high school lads didn’t have any beers there.
Whether by accident or by design I’m not sure, but the neighbouring hamlet also had their carry-around-a-mikoshi ceremony on the same day. They’ve only got a limited number of participants and they’re all getting on and are are past carrying the shrine on their shoulders, so this year they’ve just strapped it to a dinky little trolley and were seen pulling it along by a rope, to much jeering and guffawing from our group.
I mean, look how small and light it is, and it hasn’t even got any kids on it! Pathetic really. Whereas our mikoshi is the real deal and takes quite a bit of effort to carry, as you can see in this short instructional video:
Finally we finished up with a huge and satisfying meal prepared by the Women-Folk (of course) together with yet more beers.
And on top of that we were all presented with a six-pack of beer to take home as well (the high school lads were given strict instructions to hand it over to their parents).
So that was truly an action-packed and culturally stimulating weekend. Poor Ruby missed out on the whole thing, and I can’t wait until she gets home and asks what we got up so I can shoot back the ultimate 21st-century retort: READ MY BLOG.
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Katy Perry concert
Last week saw us beetling up the freeway to Osaka yet again, this time for the long-awaited Katy Perry concert. Instead of the entire family we had Ruby and I and Ruby’s friend Rio from soccer, who’s a big fan of western artists such as Avril, Katy Perry and Rihanna. Surprisingly, Rio’s parents were quite happy to let her take two days off school (her Dad even wrote a note to school asking for her to be excused) and her teacher was OK with it too. Maybe some Japanese schools are pretty cool. Having said that, Ruby’s school has never complained about all the days off she’s had, and there have been quite a few this year. Or maybe they’ve just given up on us and our crazy foreign ways altogether.
We left at about nine, stopped in on the way to pick up Rio, had lunch at the good old Miki Service Area on the freeway, and arrived at the hotel (carefully researched by Ruby) just after lunch. We had a couple of hours to kill so I took the girls over to the downtown area of Namba for a taste of big-city shopping and weird young-Japanese-person hairstyles.
Before long it was time to go back to the hotel and get ready, not forgetting the all-important sign, the one that would make us truly stand out from the throng so Katy would notice us and everything:
The venue was pretty small for someone of the stature of Katy Perry, only about 2,000, so we made sure to get there nice and early so that we could get a spot reasonably near the front. Imagine our surprise then, after an hour or so standing in the rain, when these two guys got up with megaphones and proceeded to call everybody IN ORDER BASED ON OUR TICKET STUB NUMBERS. Seriously. He’d say “now numbers 120 to 130, you can come in” and so on and so on. I looked at our tickets and sure enough, they were numbered.
And our numbers were a lousy 1641 to 1643. Despite the fact that Daddy had gone to the convenience store and purchased said tickets right on the dot of 11:00 a.m. when the tickets officially went on sale. It turns out that in Japan there are all these pre-ordering arrangements which I don’t really understand but obviously you have to read the right magazines or listen to the right radio stations. Or just have the right connections.
So by the time we got in there we were more than half-way back but it wasn’t too bad because the floor was properly stepped all the way down. Poor Rio couldn’t see too much but I had a great view and Ruby had taken her Fashion Heels for the occasion, which hurt so much after all that standing that she could barely walk home afterward but it was still worth it for a proper view of Katieeeeeee. The homemade sign didn’t get used much in the end but I suspect that Katy may not have noticed it anyway.
The show itself was great. Katy came complete with six dancers (Ruby informs me that this is nothing really; Pink apparently had 30), two backup singers, a band all dressed in white and a massive stage setup festooned with, er, lollipops. There were endless costume changes (including more than six during the song Hot and Cold, when she kept stepping into a little tent and emerging in a new outfit — most impressive) and little films to keep us amused during the endless costume changes.
The next day we had all morning free so we headed back to Namba for a bit more shopping, the highlight of which (for me at least) being when we came across this excellent shop selling nothing but yoghurt called — what else? — Yoghurtland. They had sixteen different flavours coming out of the Wall O Yoghurt:
and then you go and put six million toppings on at the special Toppings Bar:
(Note the dude posing at the back.)
Daddy was most impressed with the fresh fruit while Ruby couldn’t resist the choc chips, wafers, M ‘n’ Ms, sugar stars and other sweet muck as a result of which her yoghurt turned into a sea of sickly brown muck by the end. All part of the life lesson about not putting too much on your plate etc etc. Especially when it turns out you have to pay by weight. Still it was all good fun and definitely worth a commemorate photo:
This post was proudly brought to you by Katy Perry © and Yoghurtland™®.
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Theme park frenzy
They said we were crazy, they said it would never happen, but we did it: we finally made it to Universal Studios in Osaka.
I must say I had been dreading this trip because I had this mental image of battling through crowds and spending hours waiting in line for every ride, but in the end it all went incredibly well. We got to the entrance about three quarters of an hour before opening time (thanks to my excellent pre-planning) and managed to run straight to the rollercoaster and were on within ten minutes. Then we sauntered over to the Jurassic Park ride and found to our amazement that the wait time was just five minutes. The next one was Backdraft, and that took only 15 minutes. It all seemed so ridiculously easy that I almost started to feel foolish for having worried so much, although as I said to Ruby, it always pays to lower your expectations first so that you can be pleasantly surprised later. And as it turned out we hardly had need for our expensive Express Pass tickets at all. We ended up using them to go on a couple of favourite rides again (the roller coaster, Jurassic Park) and I have to say it is a wonderful feeling indeed to just sail regally past the queues (one hour wait time by this stage of the day) and right up to the boarding gate.
Just to backtrack a little: Ruby’s friend Tess from Australia arrived two days earlier, and Ruby and I had arranged to pick her up from Okayama airport. Since Okayama is halfway to Osaka we decided to stay the night there and continue on in the morning rather than drive all the way back to Hiroshima. The hotel turned out to be a hot spring resort so in the morning we all went and had healing hot spring baths (despite having showered the night before) and wore our ancient traditional yukatas to breakfast:
Eleni and Felix caught the bullet train up to Osaka, seeing as the Eggbeater doesn’t carry five people, at least not legally. This gave Felix the chance to try out the all-new Sakura shinkansen and pose for a commemorative photo:
On the way to the Osaka hotel Eleni and Felix came across another railway museum so they stopped in for a bit of train action:
Meanwhile the girls and I were trying out the world’s largest/highest/scariest Ferris wheel, handily located near our hotel:
The girls were far more interested in comparing electronic devices than admiring the view, which was possibly just as well as we were ridiculously high up in the air.
Then all five of us met up and checked out the acquarium, said to have the largest something-or-other in the world, although I could never work out quite what it was. Glass tank? Hammerhead shark? Marketing budget? Anyway we got to see plenty of interesting fish like this:
as well as Starship Troopers style bugs such as this:
The next day we were up early (thanks Daddy!) and off on our big adventure to Universal Studios. Our hotel was located across the river from U.S. so we got to catch this dinky little commuter ferry that, coincidentally, is used by many workers from U.S. who are housed in a big dormitory close by.
Here’s us before getting on the Back to the Future ride:
And here’s Ruby after the ride:
It wasn’t such a good ride, especially if you’ve eaten recently.
However the WaterWorld show was excellent. Here’s what the set looked like before it started:
The show was full of speedboat and jetski stunts, guns and explosions, water flying everywhere and even an entire plane that bursts through the wall at one stage for no apparent reason, although it certainly adds to the spectacle. The stunts were impressive and the guys (and one girl) who did them all were obviously well trained and athletic. Afterwards we got to pose with one of the Random Fighter Dudes:
The Jaws ride was pretty good too, with sharks a’plenty, although Felix was cheesed off to find himself on the wrong side of the boat where he only got to see “a few stupid fins.”
Here’s the classic in-the-teeth-of-a-plastic-shark pose:
After our second turn on the Jurassic Park ride Felix insisted on going inside the rope to stick his head in the dinosaur’s mouth. Ruby was, as always, unimpressed.
And on the ferry back home we bumped in to one of the actors from the WaterWorld show, who turns out to be from the Gold Coast. Apparently about half the crew on the show are from Australia. He gave Felix a few tips on stunt acting and then we were off on the five-hour marathon journey back to sunny Sunami, during which Daddy tried to take the sneaky back way and got hopelessly lost although we managed to make it back home before 10 p.m., exhausted but happy. The End.
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Bridge fetish
Hello all, long time no post.
It’s not as if there hasn’t been plenty happening in the Sushi on a Stick household of late, it’s just that I’ve been a little… well… lazy I guess.
But I’m back now with, er, renewed determination and vigour, and today I’d like to regale you with tales of our healthy family pursuits involving bridges.
A couple of weeks back Eleni and I found ourselves with a free day on a Wednesday. No work, kids in school and a beautiful sunny day. So on an impulse we took our bikes down to the ferry terminal and went over to the neighbouring island of Ikuchijima for lunch at a rather nice Italian restaurant that we’d spotted a few months back. After lunch we decided to do a bit of a tour of the rather excellent bike paths that have been created throughout the island chain in our area. You can cycle all the way from Onomichi on the mainland, island hopping your way over to Shikoku, Japan’s fourth-largest island, a distance of about 80 km. The paths are really well made out and there are little entrance and exit ramps to the bridges, and you get your own lane on the bridge away from the cars. This page has a bit of information about it including a handy map about half-way down. The ferry from our local terminal at Sunami goes direct to Ikuchijima, which puts us in the middle of the island chain.
Felix and I had done a test run the week before and rode over the Tatara-ohashi bridge to Omishima island, so Eleni and I decided to go the other way, towards Innoshima. As mentioned it was a glorious day and our route just happened, completely coincidentally, it wasn’t as if I’d planned it or anything, we were just riding past and there it was etc etc etc, a Really Excellent Gelato Shop. So of course we just had to pop in.
Finally we got going on our journey. Here is your classic self-portrait shot (note bridge in background);
Like a couple of excited kids on school camp isn’t it? But it’s not often that parents get to enjoy a parcel of unadulterated free time like this. (Actually there was that day we went skiing in February I suppose.)
Then we took the dinky little ramp up to the bridge. And a very fine bridge it was too:
Look mum no hands!
What a loverly day it was; and there was more bridge action to come the following week, when good old Mr. Nishihara invited us to go on one of those events where you get to walk along the road before they open it to traffic, to commemorate the opening of a new bridge to Hiroshima Airport. This bridge is 800 m long and boasts the largest single span in Japan apparently. Once again it was a glorious day and we all felt extremely healthy and virtuous.
No public event in Japan is complete without a big blow-up plastic arch at the start. Here we are with Mr and Mrs Nishihara. Ruby was absent for the day at a soccer match so her place was taken by my sister Liz who just happened to be in town.
It’s not often you get to admire the view from a road bridge, so Felix is making the most of the opportunity.
Here he is making a bit too much of the opportunity, just before being told off by the Men in Yellow Jackets.
There were lots of people (1500 to be exact; you had to pre-book) but plenty of room for gawking at the scenery below.
It was a seriously high bridge, too.
So I think we’ve satisfied our bridge fetish for the time being, and I promise not to use the word “bridge” any more in this post.
Today we are all very excited because Ruby’s Bestest Friendest Everest from Australia, called Tess, is coming over for a visit, braving multiple threats of earthquake, tsunami and radiation to be with her friend Ruby for a fun-filled action-packed culturally stimulating 12 days of madness and mayhem in the land of the economic doldrums. What’s more, she’s coming all by herself, not a parent in sight (or not ones that she knows personally anyway), but apparently the airline people have promised to feed her and look after her along the way which is nice.
Tonight Ruby and I are to pick up Tess at Okayama airport, which is about an hour and a half up the road, then we’re going to stay the night at Okayama before heading off to Osaka to fulfill a longstanding promise to take the kids to Universal Studios, which looks to have some serious rides in it. Never mind the stupid parades, I’m in for some ride action. I’ve even splashed out on some Express Pass booklets so that we don’t have to spend hours waiting in line (or so they say; it remains to be seen how the system works. After all, if everyone splashes out on Express Pass booklets won’t we all be waiting together?). We’re also planning to check out the impressive aquarium just near where we’re staying.
While the girls and I are in the car, Felix and Eleni will be travelling up to Osaka in style on the bullet train. They will be taking the brand new Sakura train, the one that travels all the way down to Kagoshima on the southern tip of the southern island of Kyushu. Felix is very excited because he has made it his mission to either see or ride on all the different types of bullet trains at some stage during our time in Japan, and the Sakura is the newest and latest one there is. I have warned him about the dangers of developing a trainspotting habit that may never leave him in adulthood; hopefully it will wear off by the time he turns 18.
So another big road/rail trip for the Sushi on a Stick household although in truth it’s only a matter of three days. May is also shaping up as a big month for road trips but I’ll leave that for another post.
bridge (oops)
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Skool holidays
Just got back from our spur-of-the-moment holiday up in Kyoto and Nagoya, and what a big week it was.
It all began when our friend Miyuki, who lives in Nagoya, rang up to say that she had a spare room for a couple of nights at a swish hotel at Kyoto (foreign guests who’d cancelled their trip to Japan) that she had managed to snare at a bargain rate and wondered if we’d like to take it off her hands. We’d been sort of planning a return trip to Kyoto so it seemed too good to pass up. The only problem was that she’d booked for two people, so we had to sneak the kids in and out through the back entrance, plus they had to sleep in the same bed. The kids were initially unimpressed at this woeful ethical behaviour by their parents but after they discovered the enormous television, the huge fluffy beds and the exclusive Guest Lounge with free hot chocolate we didn’t hear too many more complaints.
On Tuesday we headed out to beautiful Arashiyama gorge up north of Kyoto. Last time we went there we comprehensively failed to make it onto the cute little Puffing Billy type tourist train that winds its way along the river. This time we were in luck. Speaking of which, some sort of Lucky Devil got on to the train half-way along and insisted on taking a self-portrait with us, on our camera.
Emboldened with our success on the scenic train, decided to take the cute little tourist trap boat back down the river, which was even more scenic. The boat goes over a few family-friendly rapids along the way—definitely not your white-water New Zealand experience but good clean fun nevertheless.
And when the boat passed the train going up the river, the friendly rower/tour guide dudes instructed us to help them advertise their business by waving enthusiastically at the people on the train. What’s more, we did what we were told. And when they told us to be more enthusiastic, we dutifully waved even harder. The tourist mind is so pliable.
As if to reinforce this very point, towards the end of the journey another boat pulled up alongside and started selling snacks and drinks. My immediate response was to refuse on principle but it was kind of cute and we were all feeling a bit hungry and… OK, so we bought the snacks and drinks. The tourist mind is so very pliable.
Here are our guides, who did a good job of steering through the mighty rapids and manipulating our pliable tourist minds for one and a half hours:
Afterwards we had lunch at the very same restaurant as last time, which you can see here in the background:
Wednesday saw us heading back to the Shijo shopping district because Ruby was keen to sashay around dressed up in high fashion including the new shoes that she bought by mail order with her Very Own Pocket Money. Unfortunately the fashionable high heels gave her sore feet by the end but she learned a valuable lesson about the price of fashion. We also took the opportunity to take a spin through the very excellent Nishiki Food Market.
This market, which must be about a kilometre long, features hundreds of tiny stalls selling all manner of wonderful delicacies. It took considerable willpower to stop myself from trying to buy half the market and take it home although we did manage to do a bit of damage on the pretext of picking up a few things for dinner that night.
Dinner that night was taken at Miyuki’s place in Nagoya, about two and a half hours away from Kyoto. And it was quite nice to be back on futons again. The Kyoto hotel was I think the first bed I’ve slept on since leaving Australia, and it was a bit weird being so high up off the ground; Eleni and I have decided that we altogether prefer the feel of a futon on a tatami mat, so much so that we are toying with the idea of getting rid of our bed in Australia and installing some tatami mats on the floor.
Just near Miyuki’s house is the world’s thinnest building:
Apparently this building was slapped up on a tiny slice of land next to a railway embankment many decades ago. The embankment (and railway line) have long since disappeared but nobody can work out who owns the land so the building remains. It’s a ramen noodle shop downstairs and Miyuki says that people live in it upstairs although how they can possibly lay out a futon is beyond me, since it’s narrower than my handspan—without the benefit of a measuring tape, we estimate less than 1.5 metres.
On Thursday we headed out to the Maglev Railway Park, a flash new railway museum that opened just two weeks ago. Felix was in his element posing in front of hundreds of different trains:
and taking millions of photos (most of which were subsequently deleted by heartless Daddy).
Here’s a photo that Ruby took with the miniature effect on her camera:
Quite spooky isn’t it? You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a picture of a model train with little plastic people in it. Speaking of people, the place was absolutely packed.
When we got there right at opening time there was an enormous queue already, and by the time we left after lunch the queue was only slightly less enormous. There were even queues for the men’s toilets, and on the way out people were queueing up for 20 minutes just to reach the cash register at the museum shop (this provided us the perfect excuse not to buy anything). Notwithstanding the crowds, though, it was a fantastic museum, with plenty of trains to climb on as well as panel displays, videos, a massive model railway, film theatres, historical photos, explanations of all the bits and pieces that go in a train, hands-on activities of all kinds, train driving simulators, literally everything you can think of about trains. I reckon you’d need at least a full day, if not two, to take it all in. Sadly we were there for only a few hours but Felix certainly enjoyed himself, which was after all the main point of the exercise.
What’s more, he managed to scored a turn on the Shinkansen N700 bullet train simulator. You have to put your ticket into a lottery when you go in and given the number of people there it was probably a one in one-thousand chance so he was incredibly lucky. The simulator features a huge wide screen that’s so overwhelming it can make you feel giddy, even watching from the viewing area at the back. When you’re sitting inside the capsule it is impressively realistic. So Felix got to pilot a bullet train for the first and probably only time in his life:
And even Ruby the co-pilot seemed to enjoy the experience.
After lunch we met up with friend Naho and her Italian partner Adamo at a place that could best be described as an Italian oasis in Nagoya. It’s a restaurant that has been done out like a real Italian bar, complete with Genuine Imported coffee machine and Real Live Italians behind the counter. It is clearly a mecca for Italians living in Nagoya, who could be seen coming and going all afternoon. The coffee was excellent and the pizza was the best I’ve had since we ate at Adamo’s restaurant last summer. A return visit to his restaurant was in fact on the itinerary for this trip but sadly the restaurant is no longer. However the Italian bar experience was even better, and I happily spent most of the afternoon sitting there ordering coffee after coffee and eating pizza and just chatting. The bar is located in a shopping mall so the kids were able to wander off and look at the shops while the rest of us just sat around. I even managed to knock back an Amaretto with Adamo (Mr Nishihara would have been proud of me, drinking during the day like that). And since Adamo doesn’t speak much English I got a chance to dust off my Italian which brought back wonderful memories of our time in Italy. Basically, I was in heaven. It was such a fantastic experience that later, on the train home, I found myself slowly readjusting to reality, like when you’ve spent the afternoon immersed in a really good book. Or maybe it was just the Amaretto wearing off.
Friday was the last day of our trip. We had to go all the way back from Nagoya to Hiroshima, a car trip of about seven hours. The equivalent, in fact, of driving to Osaka and back in a day, but who would be mad enough to do a thing like that? So we decided to break up the journey with a visit to a ninja training park located in a beautiful spot tucked away in the mountains where ninjas used to train, or so it says in the brochures. (Actually it’s true, I’ve had it independently verified.)
Our resident ninja got put through his paces on the course, which included various ninja activities including rope swinging;
log walking:
wall scaling:
target practice:
err… rock climbing:
and the best bit of all, chucking those round steel ninja blades at a wooden target:
At the end, the trainer Ken-ken distributed little certificates to all the ninja graduates.
And we finished up by going for a walk along the nearby river.
Then we drove home for five and a half hours. On the way I made the mistake of having a Starbucks coffee at a parking area on the freeway and realised just how bad they area, having been spoilt by the genuine article at that bar back in Nagoya. Such a pity it’s so far away…
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Soccerpaths
On Tuesday the Sushi on a Stick household did a crazy thing: we drove seven hours to Osaka and back to see a soccer match.
Would we have even contemplated anything like this back in Australia? I very much doubt it. But this is Japan and even after a year and a bit, we’re still up for adventures. Even Ruby got in the spirit and was quite happy to tell school that she wasn’t coming in on Tuesday, which was pretty brave given that the end of year exams* were starting the very next day.
* Japanese school year starts in April
Thus it was that we set off at about 2 pm in the Eggbeater to lend our support to Melbourne Victory as they took on the might of Gamba Osaka. I love a good road trip, especially when it involves the Japanese freeways because they have these fantastic things called Service Areas where you can stop and get a feed. The really big ones have a whole assortment of cheap and cheerful restaurants plus a bakery and sometimes, if you’re really lucky, a Starbucks. (Not that Starbucks is my idea of a great coffee but it’s about the best you can hope for in Japan, where coffee standards are pretty low.) I’ve made it my mission to track down the key Service Areas in our area so that whenever we head off for a road trip we can plan our meals and coffee breaks for optimum satisfaction. After all, there’s nothing so disappointing as pulling in to a Service Area and discovering that it’s a pathetic small one without so much as a bakery in it.
Thanks to my excellent planning we did a good bakery hit at the Miki Service Area and arrived in Osaka bang on time at six, only to get stuck in peak hour traffic. The freeway exit was right near the stadium and we could see the light towers, but because of this weird one-way system we had to go all the way around an enormous park to get to the car park. It was just like that scene near the end of Little Miss Sunshine where they can see the venue right ahead but the freeway keeps taking them around in the other direction and there’s no exit. Ah, the exquisite frustration of the urban jungle. Then after spending a good half an hour crawling around the park in bumper to bumper traffic we managed to take a wrong turn and ended up speeding away from the stadium again.
Life in the country is so much simpler.
By this time it was getting close to start time and we were obliged to compromise our morals by doing a very naughty thing, to wit, parking in the closest 7-11. (Naughty parking is frowned upon in Japan, where there’s simply no such thing as unregulated on-street parking, not even in the country.) In a pathetic attempt to look like genuine customers, we went inside the 7-11 and bought some drinks, then we walked straight out of the car park and up the hill to the stadium, quaking in our boots the whole way. I then spent most of the match quaking in my boots at the thought of getting back to find a huge sticker on the windscreen, or a clamp on the wheel, or perhaps just a simple notice fluttering in the wind saying Your Car Has Been Towed.
The game itself was one of those ones you want to forget right away, on account of Melbourne Victory got thrashed 5-1. The score was 3-0 after just 11 minutes and we were starting to wonder why we’d bothered, and when Eleni said “if they get to ten goals I think we should go” it felt like a distinct possibility.
At least the car didn’t get towed.
On the way back there were no shenanigans with bakeries at the Service Area; we put the foot down and sped straight through to Sunami, making it back in record time of just three and a half hours. Luckily Daddy had packed pyjamas, pillows and blankets for the return trip so it was a warm ‘n’ cosy little Eggbeater that thundered down the expressway dodging all the overnight trucks. The kids were a bit tired and sorry the next day but they managed to get through unscathed, and Ruby managed to finish her exams without nodding off.
So although the game itself was a waste of time I’m glad we went. If nothing else, it makes Osaka feel a little bit closer now, which is just as well as we have a few trips planned up that way over the coming months, such as the Katy Perry concert in May. Speaking of concerts, Avril Lavigne is also coming to Japan in May, and the entire Sushi on a Stick household will be going along. Parents, don’t forget your earplugs.
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This blog is about the adventures of a family of Australian barbarians spending two years in the islands of southern Japan. Stay tuned for regular updates on the food, the culture, the earthquakes, the wacky festivals, the school system and more. 
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