Hokkaido

So at the two tips of Japan, we have Hokkaido in the North, and Okinawa in the South. Now, as someone who definitely doesn’t like the cold, and has been to Hokkaido before, you’d think I’d say “hey, let’s go to Okinawa for a winter holiday! It will be warm” That, at least, would be the logical thing to do. But I defy logic. I like to stomp all over it. And then, it stomps all over me.

A group of fellow gaikokujin and I all got together and decided to go to the Snow Festival, a famous yearly event in Hokkaido. Hokkaido is hidden under a few meters of snow every winter, so at the end of the year, they gather up as much snow as possible, shovel it into a few parks, and make it into ice sculptures! When I visited last year around December, it wasn’t quite the season, so all we saw was piles of snow, waiting to be transformed. This month, February, was perfect.

The plane journey from Haneda airport in Tokyo only took an hour, so we arrived in the early afternoon. Rather than staying in a hotel, we opted to go with airbnb, which is like a paid version of couchsurfer. Essentially, people living in the area open up their houses as and when they have the time/space/inclination. Airbnb puts visitors directly in touch with the homeowners, who then decide whether they want to take you in or not. Fortunately, Mr. Sangun decided that we seemed a trustworthy bunch, and eleven of us trooped into his house. It was set up rather like a B&B; a simple breakfast was provided – nothing exceptional, though we did get nabe on the last day!

It was quite centrally located, so after checking in, we quickly headed out to one of the main parks, Odori. There were some magnificent sculptures of all shapes and sizes. There were four or five main, gigantically sized buildings – an Indian Palace, a grand mosaic dedicated to the Sochi Olympics. There was even a (possibly life-sized) replica of the Malaysian parliament! Of course, no Japanese matsuri is complete without the food stalls, and so, next to the sculpture was a dedicated stall to Malaysian food! There were a few bona-fide Malaysians in there, churning out satay, teh tarik and other quintessential Malaysian delicacies. I didn’t give them a try as I was already loaded up on seafood and miso soup, but it was a surprising and fun reminder of my childhood.

The sculptures were absolutely fantastic, but even with a number of pocket warmers I was absolutely freezing, so every so often, we’d pop inside the nearest combini to warm our frozen limbs back to life. There were some repeated themes – Funashi, a really popular mascot, and anpan man, the mascot for a particular brand of bread. We trudged along the entire street and back to ensure that we didn’t miss anything. It was all very cool (perhaps around -5 or so, to be precise…)

We certainly appreciated a nice hot dinner afterwards

Girls and Pancakes

Hinamatsuri is a celebration for the little ladies; “girls’ day”, or “doll’s day” in Japan. There’s also a corresponding “boys’ day” later on in the year, but that’s gradually just become a “children’s day”, so hinamatsuri is a particularly lovely little reminder to appreciate the young ladies.

One of my co-workers made her daughter some colourful sushi, a traditional meal on the day. Other typical hinamatsuri ingestibles include shirozake, which is a type ofsake made from fermented rice and hishimochi, a diamond-shaped colored rice cake. So, while I couldn’t get out to any shrines to see a display of the ningyo (sets of dolls that represent the Imperial Palace’s occupants during the Heian period), I paid my respects by visiting a local Baskin Robbins for ice cream. I’m not being entirely facetious, for although it’s not exactly a traditional food, Baskin Robbins is doing a special set of ice cream “dolls” to capitalize on the festival. The deal was a set of five scoops of ice cream topped with little faces and accessories.

As usual, Japan thinks of all the small details – the set was served in a box that imitates the platform on which the dolls are displayed in a shrine. 

Ningyo, to go into a little more detail, are traditional wooden dolls. Unlike daruma, which are essentially spherical and simply, but brightly painted, ningyo are more elaborate. The typical hina doll will be wearing more kimono than a Japanese person even owns. They’re as realistic as possible – some even have human hair! A complete set of dolls has 15 characters, representing different courtly characters, but as long as one has the basic Emperor-Empress/male-female pair, that’s also deemed acceptable.

Crunching uncouthly on the ningyo's face

I don’t think we could have handled fifteen scoops of ice-cream, though had the opportunity arisen, I’m sure my appetite would have valiantly risen to the challenge. I certainly felt as though I deserved the ice-cream, since I got lost cycling there, and took a good 40 minutes pedaling around before I found the place! Instead, we settled for a doll each, and then I followed it up with a triple scoop of matcha, choc chip mint and oreo chop chip. And a free taster of Amaretto chocolate. Thank you, Baskin Robbins. Thank you.

It can only be bought in sets, it’s ¥1,700 for 5 cups. Check the Baskin Robbins website for the nearest location near you. Kotaku has some more information on it!

Before and after?

Now, the following day was of course the 4^th of March, which will be familiar to many people in the Western hemisphere colloquially as “Fat Tuesday” (oh you Americans), or “Pancake Day” (oh us Britons), or perhaps more correctly, “Shrove Tuesday”. For the less Catholic of us, it’s the day before Lent, a month of restraint and appreciation leading up to Easter. Many people give up desserts, sweets, or bad habits. However, the day before the 5^th (Ash Wednesday) is a free-for-all. In England, this means pancakes. So, I went from celebrating with ice-cream, to pancakes.

A good friend of mine, Amelia, invited myself and a few others over. We went all out – a good twenty eggs, five packs of bacon, mushrooms galore, spinach, whipped cream, a good half kilo of strawberries, and we even had sprinkles! We doubled a random recipe that we found online and still ended up with the same amount of pancakes, but it was just the right amount for the five of us. The amazing Sushi-chan did a fantastic job pancake flipping, ramped up our kitchen skills by making two batches of pancakes, one normal wheat-base, and the other gluten-free.

These gluten-free pancakes are ridiculously easy to make. I sourced the recipe from The Skinny Confidential. While I didn’t have any flaxseed, I think they still turned out pretty well. The edges look burned, but I couldn’t taste the char at all, so I’m wondering whether it’s just the way the ingredients react. Where is my McGee On Food and Cooking when I need it?

With a few deliberately blackened bananas, we tossed one into the blender, added two eggs, and blended the whole thing. This is literally the entire recipe. TLDR? Kind of impossible, but here ya go…

Ingredients:

1 banana

2 eggs.

Blend. Put oil in pan. Heat pan. Cook in frying pan. Makes one face-sized pancake (unless you have a super tiny or huge face, sorry, I lied)

It doesn’t get much simpler than that, really! I think it works best this way for sweet pancakes. If I were to remake it with savoury toppings, I’d add a few herbs in and a pinch of salt. It tastes banana-y, but not overwhelmingly so, so it’s a nice plain base, as long as you’re not averse to a hint of banana complementing whatever you decide to top it with.

One savoury, one sweet.

For the purposes of the photo, I tried to make a bacon face, I don’t think it worked very well though. After this, I piled on the bacon and vegetables like no tomorrow. There’s also a small hoard of cheese melting nicely underneath the pancake. A proper Paleo indulgence!

Quizu over and out~

Downtown Nagoya

Cat-bus 

“Gai-koku-jin wa doko desu ka?” my friend called out, stomping into an izakaya in central Nagoya. He wasn’t even intoxicated at the time. I knew it was going to be a good weekend. I was heading down to Nagoya mainly to check out a Studio Ghibli exhibition in Lagunasia, a small resort park, and catch up with some close friends. I didn’t do a huge amount of sightseeing, but it was a fantastic weekend all the same.

I took the local train down rather than the Shinkansen bullet train, so it took me nearly five hours to get there. It was bearable – I rather enjoy train rides when I have travel companions or a book to read, though I was admittedly very happy to finally reach my destination long after sunset. It was about 9.30pm by the time I finally pulled into Nagoya, and my friends took me straight for tebasaki at a famous izakaya chain, Yama-chan. Tebasaki is the Japanese take on that most quinssental of sports game snack foods – chicken wings. From what I can tell on the Japanese Wikipedia entry, the creation of tebasaki was a happy accident in the 1960s, when a chicken restauranteur, Otsubo Kenko was experimenting with new seasonings. While the shop usually served whole chickens, using chicken wings was obviously easier for testing new flavours. Fortunately, customers liked it, and it grew in popularity.

This may or may not be what I looked like eating tebasaki! That, or it's another display at the Ghibli exhibition.

There were little cartoons on the wall demonstrating the “correct” way of eating chicken wings – admittedly a lot tidier than the stuff-it-in-your-mouth-anything-goes way that I, and the rest of the world employ. All you have to do is pull the chicken wing apart at the joint. The thinner, bonier point is put aside to be gnawed on later. Next, look for where the two bones join where you have just separated the wing. Pull them slightly apart. Pincering the other end firmly with your fingers, pop the half wing into your mouth, bite down, and pull the bones out! They’ll slip right off. It took me a couple of tries to get it right; mostly because I couldn’t eat the entire thing in one go. I did, however, eventually get it right, and am now no longer a bone-fide chicken wing eater. If you have no idea what I meant by all that, here’s a handy chart I found that gives you not one but four ways to eat chicken wings! Your life will never be the same again. The method I’m talking about is “D”.

Since the boys had only drunk to sensible levels, we grabbed another few beers from the combini and headed back to my friend’s apartment to make the most of the night (and the morning, really). There’s not much more to it than that, although some people didn’t feel their best the next day.

A train station we weren't supposed to be at... Psyduck looking pensively into the distance

 We made our way back to Nagoya the next morning and got on the train to Lagunasia, which is a small children’s theme park near Toyohashi, on the Eastern side of the prefecture. However, we had got onto an express train rather than a normal one, and managed to shoot pass the station where we needed to change trains. Now, normally, that wouldn’t really be worth mentioning. However, we were clever enough not just to do that once, but coming back the other way…. You guessed it. We missed it. Well. Done. Team. So, an hour’s journey stretched out a little longer than it should have, and we ended up arriving around 12.30pm.

The twilight zone

Lagunasia is about a twenty minute walk from the nearest station, or a ten minute bus ride, but the next bus wasn’t for an hour, so we took to the streets. We felt as though we had been bizarrely transported into another country as we walked towards the park. There were numerous palm trees lining incredibly wide roads, and the water features and high-rise condos were nothing like the buildings one normally sees in Japan. After traversing through the windy twilight zone, we arrived in a rather befuddled state, bemused that we had finally, finally got to our destination.

Lagunasia is essentially a children’s theme park, with a few tame roller coasters, a log flume and some water features. It’s not huge, but it’s probably a wonderland for anyone under fifteen! They currently have a special Studio Ghibli exhibition on (¥1,600, tickets can be bought from the Lawson Loppi machines in advance if you’re interested), so the moment you enter, a large statue of Ponyo riding the wave-fish greets you.

The Borrowers Arietty

We had a few more mishaps within the park that are perhaps better left unwritten (suffice to say it involved a phone and breaking down a pirate ship, and very sheepish gaijin apologies), but we eventually found our way to the main exhibit, and bumped into some friends in the queue. 

We waited about fifty minutes to get in, and then walked around inside to see all the displays. Apparently it’s been changed recently, so there are different statues and pictures to last year, but it was good all the same. They had some excellent scenarios on show, and we were able to take pictures with a lot of the exhibits.

After we wandered round the gift shop for ages and spent our money on useless but totally amazing things. Who needs a kodama with a vibrating head? We did. I don’t even know what to put it on (and as an aside, who thinks that kodama look like mushrooms? Well, the leap from kodama to kineko isn’t that far). We all got the same things, so we’re a trio of kineko carrying weirdos. We also ended up with a jingly Makkuro kurosuke (真っ黒黒助; "pitch-black assistant") phone charm each, as well as a badge.

Some of the people we’d met at the exhibition followed us back to Nagoya for dinner. We decided to go for more Aiichi specialties, this time miso-katsu, a breaded pork cutlet with a special miso sauce. The outlet we went to is particularly famous, knows as Yabaton. The have a number of shops around; we went to a multi-floor beauty in Yama-cho. It was pretty crowded – it took about half an hour to get us seated, with other hungry customers politely lining the stairs alongside us. The kitchen is tiny but ultra-efficient – one can peer in from the outside, and there were but four people working in there, one coating all the raw pork, another frying, one perhaps ferrying other things back and forth, and then the final chef plating the finished product.

The miso katsu was the best thing I ate in Nagoya, hands down. I have a terrible weakness for fried food, it’s too delicious to give up.

We then retired to a nomihoudai, the less said about that the better.

Allow me to distract you with some soot spirits

The next day, Psyduck and J took me to Osu. It’s a pretty modernized shopping district, but has a fascinating history. While it’s now home to a number of vintage stores and kebab shops (and an excellent karaage store - wander around, it will be the one with a queue miles long, near a bizarre Alice in Wonderland shop), it was already a flourishing district in the Edo period, so it’s continued its commercial ways for a while! I stopped briefly by Osu Kannon, a temple that’s stood there since 1612. It actually has an even longer history from 1324, but was moved to its current location in the early 17^th century. As with most temples and castles in Japan, it’s a reconstruction, but still impressive. There’s also a rabbit café in the area that we didn’t have time to visit, so… we dropped into a tiny little shop and shot cans with BBguns instead. It was a completely random find! Another must-see that I missed was the Nagoya planetarium. I didn’t have time to explore the area properly, but I know that I want to go back soon!

Bang!

In fact, I’ll be making an even longer trip next month down to explore Osaka and Kyoto! It’s well worth it, though; while I’ll be on the train for 7 hours or so, I’ll be using the seishun juu-hachi kippu, a ticket for the national train line that allows the ticket holder to travel as far as they like in a day. It can be used five times, and is valid from the first of March to the tenth of April this spring. It’s ¥11,500 for a ticket, so each trip costs you ¥2,300 – it’s a very decent deal! You can also use it in tandem with others, as long as you’re travelling together, so if you’re in Japan and wanting to travel, now is the time to do so!

Quizu out~

It takes the flu

Due to a bit of an illness scare, my weekend went very differently to how I had originally planned! Instead of showing up to a hip hop event at my local bar, I spent the evening in a hospital/clinic, hooked up to two IV drip bags. Luckily, things all got sorted out and it turned out I had (and still have slight traces of currently) influenza and a bladder infection. They packed me off with a set of anti-biotics, which I have been taking dutifully ever since.

My Friday Night Companion

Unfortunately, that also meant that I had to cancel the pot luck that I was supposed to be hosting, as well as bow out of a half-marathon that I’d signed up for! I’ve only ever run the Greenwich Nike Run to the Beat half-marathon before, and this was to be my dive into Japanese events. Alas, it was not to be. In fact, I couldn’t even run my school’s cross-country event, so I felt a little down at the outset. Instead of my beautifully imagined weekend of run-dance-eat-run, it looked like: fever, loneliness and the gradual onset of snow and grumpiness.

The way my area looked before setting off for Hokkaido

The weather’s been a little crazy everywhere lately – although the celebration for setsubun, the first day of spring has been and gone, we’ve had snow twice since then! Once just before I set off for Hokkaido (ironic, since I was headed there for the yuki matsuri, or snow festival), and then again this weekend. Apparently, Shizuoka has seen the heaviest snow in forty-five years! It’s crazy. Further up north, in places like Gotemba, the snowfall reached 85cm. It’s not called Hokkaido in Shizuoka for nothing! Fortunately, around my area, the snow quickly melted away, but it was pretty miserably cold for a few days. Combined with my illness, I got into bed wearing two pairs of trousers, two hoodies on two shirts, and tucked myself under five blankets. I woke up in the night, sweating out the fever, and fought my way to the surface, only to recoil at the frigid temperatures outside. Japanese houses aren’t very well insulated, so my blanket-igloo has been a lifesaver this winter.

Not to mention something that brightened up my entire week:

A surprise Valentine's gift! How insanely cute is this giraffe?

The snows began to melt on Saturday, and even bought visitors, one bearing chocolate, and the other a ring! We ate nabe, Japanese hot pot, and chatted the day away. On Sunday, the sun shone bright and I dragged myself outside for a walk. If I couldn’t run 21km, then I was going to do the next best thing; walk around and explore.

I’m glad I did, because I climbed a mountain nearby, and it was beautiful. We have the best views of Mt Fuji one could ask for, and it just felt so good to get up and moving again. I’m not a big fan of cold weather, but it was just perfect; cool enough to walk around without working up a sweat, but warm enough to sit on the riverbank and read a book thinking, damn, this is the life.

Walking up the mountain

Endless stairs

... But the view was so worth it

Just... beautiful

So it was a pretty worth-it weekend, even if it didn't go as planned! 

Big improvement from Friday!

Outside a shrine I found

By the river (yes, it took many, many tries with my self-timer here)

Peace out guys

Quizu