We’re now in our room at the Hotel Granvia in Kyoto. Tracie is delighted because we’re on the side of the building that overlooks the train tracks, so she can watch the shinkansen go to and fro. I’m delighted because I just found three new origami books at the bookstore in the station, including a new book on modular (“unit”) origami by Tomoko Fuse. We’re both delighted to be back at our favorite hotel, once again.

I’ve fallen behind a little bit on the blogging. I haven’t covered our stay in Matsue, where we visited a castle and the Adachi art museum. Before I write about that, though, I intend to post several sets of photos on Flickr. Stay tuned… read more

We’re in Matsue now. There’s some game show on prime-time TV that involves brush calligraphy. Try to imagine a game show in the USA that is based on competitive handwriting.

On our last afternoon/evening in Tokyo, our friend Rafael ignored the jet-lag of a 30-hour journey ending the day before and joined us at our hotel. We ended up going out for dinner at the nearest Ippudo, a popular chain ramen restaurant. It has the trappings and arrangement of a traditional Japanese restaurant with the cooking area alongside the dining area. On Rafael’s recommendation I ordered ramen with miso as the main flavoring and a side of gyoza. read more

I’m writing this on an express train we boarded in Okayama, bound for Matsue. It’s not as smooth as a shinkansen but it’s roomy and comfortable. Since this will be a 2.5-hour ride, I grabbed a bottle of tea from the nearest vending machine. It wasn’t stocked with teas with which I am familiar, so I chose this bottle somewhat at random:

To paraphrase one of the great lines from The Raiders of the Lost Ark movie series, I chose unwisely. I don’t think I could acquire a taste for this one. Tracie grabbed the camera to capture a visual record of my reaction: read more

Ramen originated in China but it’s a big deal in Japan. This might be faintly surprising since ramen’s main virtue in the eyes of many Americans is its low price. Cheap, instant ramen exists in Japan also, but here the appreciation of ramen is defintely not restricted to less-affluent college students.

One dramatic illustration of this point is the existence of the ramen museum in Yokohama, which we visited on April 5. The ramen museum has a full-sized reproduction of a portion of Tokyo from 1958, including eight or so ramen restaurants. It looks like this: read more

Portions of the sidewalk near Ueno Station in Tokyo are paved with Truchet tiles. How cool is that?

Sorry I’ve been slacking off on the posting a bit. The past few days have been full ones and I haven’t found the time to do much writing. We traveled from Tokyo to Kobe today by shinkansen. While en route I wrote about half of a post describing our adventures with ramen. I’m not sure whether I’ll finish it tonight; we want to get up to the lounge on the 37th floor of the hotel to check out the view before it closes at 9:30. For the nonce I present the following photograph: read more

It’s the…

[Inside joke, one of those you-had-to-be-there sorts of things]

If there happen to be any readers of Japanese in the audience, or anyone more familiar with Japanese cuisine, perhaps they could tell me what this is:

I had it in the train station in Kamakura yesterday (albeit with udon rather than soba). It was pretty tasty, but I have no idea what that hash-brown-like thing was. It had a sort of doughy texture inside. It might have been tofu, but it didn’t really seem like tofu.

I’ve been distracted from blogging by a Japanese TV show that seems to consist of clips taken from Western TV shows of people doing impressive and/or stupid things. There’s a group of around a dozen commentators who talk about the clips. I can’t understand a word of it but it’s kind of fascinating in that it sort of illustrates something about the Japanese perception of the West. In most cases I think the reaction is something along the lines of, “wow, that was really dumb!” and they’re right. read more