J³ (James, Joel, Japan)

Yeah, ok. That’s not a place name or a word in kanji. But it was important to today’s events.

I find that when I’m planning holidays, planned activities where timing causes stress create a kind of tunnel vision for me. All I can think about in the weeks leading up to the holiday is that particular activity – in 2017, it was the day went from Yunomine Onsen to Tokyo via Nachi; in 2018 it was the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route day. For this trip, it was today’s planned activity. Like, there’s days further along in my itinerary where I don’t have anything planned – that’s how much today (and to a lesser extent, Monday) occupied my attention.

At least, that was the case until last week, when I discovered Mister Super-Typhoon Hagibis bearing down on Tokyo, coincidentally arriving on the same day that was already my focus, and inconveniently negating everything I had planned.

In a slightly lesser but more literal sense, I find being rained on causes a lot of tunnel vision for me – if I’m using an umbrella or wearing a raincoat hood, I just seem to stop looking around at things; I look down or huddle up. A hoodie hood or even a cold-weather jacket hood doesn’t seem to have the same effect. I remember doing a night bush walk in the Barrington Tops one year while it was raining, and honestly all I remember about that (aside from the leeches) is the sound of the rain on my raincoat hood, and the sound of my breathing being magnified by the hood, and pretty much nothing about the walk itself. I mean, granted it was night time, but surely I ought to remember something.

But on with the show. I did not sleep well last night – a combination of the usual first-night-in-a-new-place issue with the usual setting-the-alarm-early-then-anticipating-it-all-night issue. So I basically spent the whole night going in and out of a light doze, and also being forced to watch an irritating recurring dream featuring a whole bunch of people competing to colour sectors of a map in their team’s colours, only noone could tell who was winning because either everyone was colourblind or the screens were in greyscale so all the teams looked the same colour, except for one person who had perfect memory and could remember which specific individual won each specific sector. But, moving on.

Eventually woke up at 6am so I could hurriedly get dressed, pack away my chargers, and set up my travel SIM card (because it’s a 16-day SIM and a 17-day trip – had to manage yesterday evening with as many different free wifi hotspots as I could come across) before leaving by 6:30. As I worked out last night, it’d take me a quarter hour to walk to the station, but I also needed to buy breakfast en route, because I was checking out of the hotel before they started serving it.

Outside, it was apparent that Hagibis was on his way – it was pouring down rain and also gusting with wind, so I had to alternate between wrangling the umbrella and just putting it down and dashing. I stopped at the convenience store hoping to grab some rice balls, but there wasn’t a single one there – I thought at first that people had panic-bought the entire supply, but I noticed later that other stores had plenty, and as I left, a truck pulled up outside, so perhaps today’s supply simply had not been delivered yet. So instead I bought a meat bun, and a sweet chocolate danish thing, some milk tea for fluids and calcium and a cup noodle for dinner (not panic-bought – bought with aforethought), and headed damply for the station.

Today I was off to the town of Chichibu in Saitama prefecture, about an hour and forty minutes away by rapid express (or an hour twenty by limited express, grr) at the other end of the Seibu Chichibu line, which is what I was doing at the Seibu Ikebukuro station. I headed into the station with my Suica card and stood on the platform munching my meat bun.

Brief lesson time, “Seibu” means “west Musashi” (the “bu” in Seibu” is the same character as the “mu” in “Musashi”) – I’ve mentioned Musashi before; it’s the name of the old province that was comprised of what is now the Tokyo Metropolis, most of Saitama Prefecture and parts of Kanagawa Prefecture. Seibu is called such because it originally served the western half of Musashi – it’s paired with Tobu, “east Musashi”, which (as you can probably guess), served the eastern half. I mean, it’s no longer split east-west like that – both companies have lines going all over now. But what amuses me is that at Ikebukuro, the Seibu platforms – and the Seibu shopping centre – are on the east side of the JR Ikebukuro station, while the Tobu platforms and shopping centre are on the west.

Soon, my train arrived. Contrary to the “all gone” predictions from the station attendant yesterday, the rapid express was basically empty. Not sure why everyone would have gone for the reserved train and noone for the non-reserved train. I almost wonder if it would have been worth trying the ticket office again – it usually opens at 9am on Saturdays, but there was a sign in the window last night saying (assuming I read it correctly) that because the trains were being stopped at 1pm, the office would open at 6:50am instead. But, well, I was there, and the train would be coming soon, so I might as well get it. And it’d even beat the 7:30 limited express to Chichibu by three minutes.

So, I hopped on. Then hopped off again, because I remembered I wanted to be in the first car so that I could see the forward view – and because I was at the rear car, that meant walking the entire length of the train. Ate my bun and drank my tea. And then as we pulled into Hanno Station on the outskirts of Tokyo, I suddenly remembered that at Hanno, the train reverses direction, and it’s after Hanno that the view gets really nice, so I had to walk the length of the train again. Though, there were some rather pretty columns holding up the station roof.

This amused me. It’s not often you see the “next station” and “previous station” indicators pointing in the same direction.

(Side note, Higashi-Hanno, the next stop after Hanno, is one of the Anime 88 Pilgrimage stops, because it’s the home station of the characters in an anime that I quite enjoy called “Yama no Susume” (subtitled in rough translation as “Encouragement of Climb”, but a direct translation is more like “the recommended mountain”) about schoolgirls who climb mountains for fun – the main character’s experience on Mount Fuji is nearly identical to mine. It’s from this series that I first learnt about Mount Takao, which James and I visited last year. I would have liked to get off the train and poke around, but weather and timing were against me. But I digress.)

The view was quite spectacular, though with rain constantly pelting the train windows, it was impossible to photograph. After a few delays thanks to the rain – incluidng having to wait in stations for delayed trains coming the other way, since the Hanno-Chichibu section is single-tracked – we eventually arrived at Seibu-Chichibu Station at 9:30, about forty-five minutes behind schedule.

I headed out of the station and into pouring rain, but pretty much no wind at all. I pondered getting a taxi to the hotel, but it was only a few minutes’ walk away, so I put up the umbrella and went. I probably should have gone for the taxi, because my legs and shoes and suitcase got quite damp – my shoes, in particular, are not as waterproof as I may have hoped.

Here in Chichibu, I’m staying at the Comfort Inn Miyabi – unfortunately, there’s no Toyoko Inn in this town, and while there is a Route Inn (another business hotel chain) much closer to the station, they only had smoking rooms left. Checking in, I was speaking to the woman behind the counter in Japanese, when in mid-conversation she suddenly switched to almost-perfect English. And then handed me the room key – I could just go straight up, even though it was only 10am, an hour before required check-out time at 11am, and a full seven hours before the first official check-in time at 3pm. Which was nice, because it meant I didn’t have to kill time in the lobby – or worse, go back out into the pouring rain.

My room’s on the top floor – floor six – with a nice view out over some of the hills that separate Chichibu from the adjoining village of Yokoze. As I first opened the room door, I found a step up and a pair of slippers on top of the step – a common feature in traditional Japanese houses – and I almost wondered if I’d actually booked a ryokan by accident. But no, when I opened the inner door (past, to my further surprise, a tiny kitchen) I found a western-style bed. And a balcony. Discovered the light in the bedroom has a remote control when I tried to turn the aircon on and the lights turned off instead (the aircon remote was hanging on the wall behind the curtains – took me a while to spot it).

I opened my suitcase to change out of my wet trousers and socks, and discovered that though most of the suitcase seemed to shed water quite well, the zipper had leaked, so things around the top edge of the suitcase had gotten a bit wet – including my Lonely Planet guidebook, which I’d packed at the top so I could get at it. After spreading things out to dry, I pulled my iPad out of my backpack and found that it too was a bit damp – even though most of the backpack seemed to shed water quite well, the underside of my bag had soaked through. I’m not even sure how it could have gotten rained on that side – perhaps I put it down on a wet spot in the hotel lobby when I got out the proof-of-booking paperwork. That one’s particularly annoying, because the backpack has a rain cover in a built-in pouch, which I never think to actually use. Fortunately, nothing that dislikes water got particularly wet, but now I had basically the entire contents of my backpack and half the contents of my suitcase spread around the floor and wardrobe.

After I spent a bit of time relaxing in the hotel, I thought I should probably go out and get some lunch before the forecast 50-knot winds arrived. I put on my new raincoat and waterproof pants that I bought especially for this trip, put my wet socks and shoes back on, and headed out. There’s a food court attached to Seibu-Chichibu Station that I’d quite wanted to try, but I discovered when I passed through earlier that they closed it for the whole day (thanks, Obama Hagibis). So instead I headed down the main street towards a restaurant suggested by a friend that serves miso pork bowl, a local specialty. I confess, I did not have a huge amount of hope that it’d be open… and it wasn’t. There was a beef bowl shop I passed on the way that was open, but I still kinda wanted to try some local specialties, so I kept walking past it to the Chichibu Michi no Eki. (Passed a bookshop on the way, and tried again for a stamp book – still no dice.)

Michi no Eki – literally “stations of the road” – are basically like Australian highway rest stops, but far grander. Aside from providing a car park and a toilet, they always have a shop selling various local produce and souvenirs, and quite frequently a restaurant with local dishes, and also provide tourist information. Sometimes they have even more features, like onsen baths, fish markets, lookouts, gardens and so forth. They’re basically the modern equivalent of the Tokaido and Nakasendo post towns. I’ve been wanting to visit one (or more) for a long time, but have thought I’d pretty much need to rent a car and go driving on the highways… only to discover when planning this trip that Chichibu has one sitting just a few blocks from the centre of town. (This one doesn’t have an onsen, though there is one in the food court at Seibu-Chichibu.)

Buuuut… I arrived at 1pm, only to discover it had closed at 12. And I really didn’t want to walk all the way back to the beef bowl restaurant – aside from the fact that I was now closer to my hotel than the beef bowl place, my socks were getting wetter and wetter – they were already starting to squelch when I passed the beef bowl place the first time. So, like the dog with two bones, I got greedy, so now I had neither. And also wetter shoes. Though… I guess it’s more “picky” than “greedy”…

Instead, I walked a few blocks to a convenience store I’d previously seen from my room’s balcony (it’s slightly to the left in the photo of the view I posted above) and perused the bento boxes they had there. I was so unenthused with the available options that I almost considered heading for the beef bowl place anyway… then turned around to spot a yakisoba-pan sitting on the shelf, and I’d been wanting to try yakisoba-pan for aaaages, so I grabbed it. And some onigiri, because they spited me this morning. (“Spited” looks weird. Maybe on the pattern of smite > smote, spote?) The yakisoba-pan was scrumptious (it’s fried soba noodles in basically a hot dog bun – yaki=fried, pan=bread, from the French “pain”). This is my hotel, by the way. And a rather strongly-flowing stormwater channel in between the convenience store and my hotel.

After lunch, the wind was starting to pick up a bit… which is to say, Hagibis was finally arriving in earnest. I also started getting notices on my phone from the Chichibu City government over the Emergency Alert broadcast system – and I’ve quite literally never seen that before in my life. I’m simultaneously impressed by the utility and slightly creeped out by how Big Brother knows I’m in Chichibu. Anyway, they were all in Japanese, saying things like “Emergency level 4 – there’s a risk of flooding and landslides, so if you’re near a river or mountain, start thinking about evacuating. If you can’t, get on the second floor or higher”.

I started getting a mite concerned when they reached level 5, which means “The disaster is already happening.  Make the best decisions to protect your life.” but when I went downstairs to talk to the hotel desk person about it, she barely even batted an eye. Sooo… I guess I’ll take her word for it? Also, I’m on the sixth floor anyway. (I do suspect there’s been landslides here in Saitama somewhere, though I’m having difficulty finding any news articles with Google. Hoping that the train line out of here hasn’t been cut…)

Had my rice balls for arvo tea.

Later, I had my cup noodle for dinner – kitsune udon. The distinctive feature is the mat of fried tofu on top of the udon noodles – it’s called kitsune (fox) because supposedly foxes like fried tofu. It looked uncomfortably like a sponge, though. Quite tasty, either way.

Now it’s time get to bed. Maybe catch up on some sleep – I’ve had two early mornings in a row with a late night in between. I don’t want to sound like I’m taunting the storm, but… I’m not sure Hagibis seems quite as powerful as I was picturing. I mean, granted I’ve been inside since the wind started and not out standing in it, but I was lead to expect sustained winds as fast as a car driving on a highway, but gazing out over the balcony, it’s kinda just looked like a rather blustery (albeit very rainy) day. It is forecast to continue basically all night, though, so I guess I haven’t even seen the worst of it. And I’m trying not to notice the news articles making comparisons to the Kanogawa Typhoon of 1958, which killed more than 1200 people…

(Typhoon Hagibis now has its own Wikipedia page, mind – that’s how you know you’ve got it made. Last time I checked, it just redirected to 2019 Pacific typhoon season.)

Fortunately, sunny weather is still forecast for tomorrow, and tomorrow’s big event is still on, though possibly with a bit of a delay – they’ll make the final call at 6am, in any case. What event? Why, you’ll find out tomorrow.

I hope.

Today’s photo count: A hundred and ninety-six. I’ll start taking more photos when the rain stops. Promise.

Today’s step count: 8050 steps – 5.4km – 2 flights of stairs

I’ve decided to go back to my naming scheme from Volume II, just because – i.e. the out-of-context translation of the kanji in a place name relevant to the post. Though, this one’s not quite out of context – the kanji that make up the name “Ikebukuro” actually mean “bag of ponds”, but I didn’t think that was quite so catchy a name, so I went with the historical etymology.

So yeah, today I flew to Japan! One of the weird quirks of the sale under which I bought the tickets was that all flights went via Brisbane, so off to the Domestic Terminal I went! The flight took off at 7:30 am, but remembering how much time I spent waiting around at the airport before my trip in 2017, I made sure to call the Uber at a much more reasonable hour. But still not very reasonable. As an added bonus, I didn’t leave anything behind this time. Checked in without a hitch, headed inside, bought a few things (my customary Readers’ Digest, a packet of tic tacs for occasional snacks, et cetera) rode the sole moving walkway left in the Qantas terminal, then boarded the flight.

This flight was on a plane with a 3-3 seat arrangement – I booked a window seat (right over the wing, as I always seem to manage to do), and there was a woman in the aisle seat, but noone in between us which was nice – no armrest battles, we could stretch out a bit, and so forth. I remembered to have my iPad on hand for the entertainment system, but wound up just reading the American Readers’ Digest I bought on the way home at Doha airport last year, and doing crosswords. They served us breakfast – I chose the ham and cheese toasty, but it was very teensy. Quite tasty, though – fancy ham, fancy cheese, fancy bread.

As we landed in Brisbane – an hour and ten minutes later, according to the captain, but only ten minutes later according to my watch – it ocurred to me that I’ve never really visited Brisbane aside from passing through the airport a few times. The only capital city in Ausrtralia I’ve not visited, aside from Hobart, and I’ve never been to Tasmania at all. For some reason, the back half of the plane deplaned through the back door – i.e. down the stairs and across the tarmac – while the front half walked over the skybridge. What is this, a country town airport? On the plus side, I did get a nice view of the plane.

At Brisbane, I had to get the shuttle bus to the international terminal. My internet research ahead of time, and all the signage there, said I needed to wait for the orange shuttle bus, but then the blue long-term parking bus pulled up, and the driver said he was going to the international terminal anyway, so we all hopped on. At the international terminal, I realised I had only about a half hour left until my next flight departed, and was a bit concerned by the length of the queue at security, but fortunately I made it through in just a quarter-hour – including being randomly selected for an extra test – then headed to the gate… and wound up waiting, because the plane was a bit late to board.

When we eventually boarded, I sat in my new seat (window again, and again over the wing) and waited for a seat mate to turn up – this plane was a 2-4-2 arrangement. And waited. And waited until the captain ordered the cabin crew to lock the doors – nice, my very own row. As an added bonus, the woman behind me also lacked a seat mate, and she was sitting in the aisle seat, leaving me free to recline my chair all the way, put up the armrest, and just spread out.

They fed us lunch shortly after takeoff – at about 11am Brisbane time. A bit early for lunch, I thought. Granted, that was noon in Sydney, but it still felt quite early. I had braised wagyu beef with baby onions, polenta and roasted carrots. Plus a side of focaccia, and a citrus and matcha cheesecake for dessert. Then they put the plane in night mode – shades down, lights off. But… it was full daylight outside, and we’d be landing only just after sunset. Guess they wanted us to be asleep… and docile.

I settled down to watch some movies. First, the Secret Life of Pets 2 (amusing, and with a three-concurrent-plots arrangement that I don’t really recall seeing in movies – it’s more of a TV show thing), then Apollo 11 (the long-awaited prequel to Apollo 13, though I can kinda see why they waited, because not a great deal happens in the movie – and the actor they chose to play Buzz Aldrin looks kinda like Tom Hanks, which I thought was a mistake, since he was in Apollo 13), then A Dog’s Journey, then a Japanese film called Organ (about a group of women in WWII trying to run a kindergarten in a country town for children evacuated from Tokyo, and I was kinda hoping for a grand uplifting story about everyone striving together for the greater good, but… it wound up being kinda bleak, and apparently based on a true story – the name, incidentally, refers to the reed organ that one of the main characters plays a few times, but I’m not sure it was given enough importance to be worthy of having the movie named after it, aside from everyone (and the camera) giving it a significant glance right near the end).

And that got me all the way to landing time. They served us lemon myrtle Weiss bars in the middle, and shortly before landing there was a snack of samosas and cauliflower pakora with tamarind sauce… with no cutlery, and it was kinda messy, though tasty. And then we landed, in fog and rain. And it took us twenty minutes to taxi to the terminal.

I arrived at Narita Airport – somehow, I seem to have a trend of always arriving at the same Tokyo airport that I departed from last time (and I kinda wish I hadn’t noticed that, because next trip I’m gonna find myself going “oh, I have to book this more expensive / less convenient flight so that I don’t break the pattern”). For this first night, I’m staying in Ikebukuro – and I realised in planning that if I could get through customs and immigration quickly, there was a Narita Express direct to Ikebukuro Station that left just under an hour after our landing. And I did get through customs and immigrations quickly, but… there was a huge queue at the JR Pass exchange office. So I missed the train. Bah. (Side note, one thing in these pictures that amused me: big banner ads advertising toilets. At the airport. To all the new visitors to the country.)

I also got distracted en route by a wall display about the Anime 88 Pilgrimage – it’s a newish tourist attraction modelled after the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage, which highlights 88 locations around Japan that were featured in well-known anime. Narita Airport is included as stop number zero, and it’s got a stamp, and some cards to stamp them on. I’ll be passing a few of the 88 during this trip, though not all of them have stamps.

Eventually got my JR Pass exchanged, and booked a seat on the next express. For the first time, instead of getting an all-Japan JR Pass, for this trip I’ve bought a JR East Pass covering the Kanto and Tohoku regions. Unlike the all-Japan pass, the JR East Pass can only be used on five specific days (which don’t have to be consecutive) in a fourteen-day period, which meant I had to sit down beforehand and work out which five days were my most expensive days – and getting from Narita to Ikebukuro turned out to be the fifth most-expensive day, even if I rode the cheaper private-line Skyliner express. (Slightly weird: if I went with the more expensive N’EX, it cost me less.) The JR East Pass represented a saving of about 20,000 yen over a 14-day all-Japan pass (which itself was a savings – though only slightly – over just buying all the tickets) so it was a bit of a no-brainer.

Got off the Narita Express at Tokyo Station – which was quite crowded; guess it’s the Friday evening second rush hour, perhaps – and went off to buy a few things. For starters, I need a new station stamp book… but after finding one in the first shop I walked into in 2017 and the second shop in 2018, this time I tried three shops with no success (though I confess I’m not completely certain whether they honestly didn’t have any, or just didn’t want to deal with the foreigner). Kind of annoyed at the waste of time. It’s also far more humid than I expected, so by the time I was done dragging my luggage from shop to shop, I was getting quite damp. Tossing up whether to (a ) keep trying shops, (b ) just buy a regular blank notebook, or (c ) not collect station stamps this time around…

I stopped for dinner at a place specialising in omurice and other egg dishes – I had cheesy beef stew omurice doria, which sounds like ten-car pileup of several different dishes, but it was quite tasty.

Also got some cash out – remembered my PIN this time – topped up my Suica card, and headed for Ikebukuro.

Once there, I stopped by the Seibu private line station to see if I could buy express tickets for tomorrow – I’m heading to my next destination first thing (Ikebukuro is just a place to break my journey so I don’t have to travel until midnight). And also there’s some rumblings that due to the incoming Typhoon Hagibis, all train lines in and around Tokyo are going to stop running at around 1pm. Unfortunately, the ticket office had closed before I got there (as I knew it would – it closed before I even got on the N’EX), and when I asked the guy in the manned ticket gate about it, he made an X with his arms (a common Japanese body language meaning “no” or “no good”) and said “all gone” in English, but I confess I don’t entirely know if he meant that all the tickets had been sold, or if all the limited express trains had been cancelled. Rather than gamble on having better luck tomorrow morning, I’ve decided I’ll just go for the 7:05 rapid express, which doesn’t require seat reservations – slightly slower and cheaper than the 7:30 limited express, but the limited express is also in the fancy new LAVIEW trainsets and might have been nice to ride in. Bah.

(Side note, LAVIEW is a good example of how Japan seems to like forming acronyms in weird ways. L stands for Luxury, A stands for Arrow (as in, fast as an, but it’s also the newest version of the Red Arrow trainsets, so there’s a link there), and VIEW stands for VIEW, because there’s one outside the nice big train windows. It’s just three separate words glued together, not an actual title or noun phrase or suchlike.)

After all that wasted time running around looking for things and finding very little, I didn’t arrive at my hotel until 11pm (after timing how long it’d take for me to walk from the Seibu station – or rather, to the Seibu station tomorrow morning). Plus, it was starting to rain in earnest. I’m staying at another Toyoko Inn – it’s much bigger than I’d expected; you can’t see it all from the road. There’s actually four rows of rooms – I’m in one of the interior rooms, but it does have a window… looking into a light well, perhaps, but it’s too dark to tell at 11pm. Also, the front windows are crossed with tape as a typhoon damage prevention method. A teeny bit disconcerting.

By this point, it was clear to me that my plans for tomorrow were an absolute washout. Uh, no pun intended, but yeah, bucketing rain is also involved. Forecast probabilities of 50-knot winds only climbed higher and higher as the date grew closer, and they’d be starting earlier and earlier, and by the time I landed in Japan, they were at 100% probability starting at about noon. I’d hoped I could switch my Saturday and Monday plans and somehow muddle through anyway (because Monday’s plans were in the town centre meaning I could bail any time things turned for the worse), but with 100% chance of a typhoon landing on my head at lunchtime, that wasn’t really happening. However, I still needed to take the early morning train anyway, for fear of not getting out of Tokyo at all before the trains were cancelled.

Nothing to do now but get to sleep…

Today’s photo count: a hundred and seventy-seven

Today’s step count: 10,923 – 7.6km – 7 flights of stairs

Today’s stamp count: One, the Narita Anime 88 stop zero.

I’ve mentioned this before, but so far on my trips to Japan, I’ve been pretty lucky so far as weather goes. On our first trip back in 2010, we encountered a record-breaking heat wave, yes, but we only experienced two short rain showers, and none of our planned activities were particularly effected. On my solo trip in 2017, I had one activity cancelled due to high winds, and in 2018, James and I had to endure an entire day of sustained, but overall fairly gentle, rain. Sure, it might have been nice at times to have greater atmospheric visibility, but all in all, it’s been pretty good.

This trip, things may change. Every time I’ve checked the weather forecast for my first few days on this trip, it’s been consistently predicting rain. Rain is not great, considering basically all of my plans are outdoors, I have to keep myself and my camera dry, it’s generally not enjoyable. And if I get wind and rain, it’s even worse, because I can’t even use the umbrella to keep the rain off the camera.

Today, I discovered the reason for the dire weather predictions. Meet TY 1919, also known as Typhoon Hagibis:

Very early this morning, while passing over the Mariana Islands, Hagibis was upgraded to a Category 5 super typhoon, with sustained wind speeds of up to 260 km/hr, and is to date the most powerful storm of the 2019 Pacific Typhoon Season. And yeah, as you can see, it’s headed pretty much directly for Tokyo. The 13th of October happens to be the day of the festival that I had to phone up and pay to reserve, and if there’s high winds on the day, it’s basically guaranteed to be cancelled, with no refunds. Even aside from the difficulty this would cause for my other plans, this makes me quite sad.

Fortunately, detailed predictions indicate that any specific location in the Kanto region only anticipates a 40% chance of seeing winds of greater than 50 knots (= 92.6 km/hr) at any point between now and 3pm on the Sunday, with the hour-by-hour predictions peaking at just 20% at around 9pm on the Saturday, and falling off afterwards – 50-knot winds are not anticipated at all on the 11th, when my flight will be landing. And there’s always the possibility that it’ll change direction or just fall apart. As I write this, it’s already been downgraded to Category 4.

Sooooo… fingers crossed?

(“Hagibis”, incidentally, is a Filipino word meaning “swiftness” or “velocity”. In case you were wondering. It’s also the name of one of the Philippines’ first comic book characters.)

I’m visiting Japan again! In a little under two weeks!

Planning for this trip started way back in June, actually, because Qantas suddenly had a sale for flights to Japan. With a family holiday for this year looking a little unlikely due to difficulties in scheduling time off four all four of us at once, I decided instead to head off to visit Japan on my own again, in a semi-impulse buy – semi-impulse in that I only had three days to buy the tickets while the Qantas sale was still on, but though I still have a huge list of things I’d like to do in Japan, I wasn’t even in the beginning stages of planning out another trip, so it wound up being a case of snap up the tickets now, and plan the trip later. And after consultation with the boss at work, I basically had a choice between going basically almost immediately – which is to say, in the July-August range – or going in October. And considering I’ve done August in Japan already, I decided October would be a new experience for me. Plus, as an added bonus, the Tokyo Metro Underground Mysteries starts in October.

(Side note, the Qantas sale included business class flights for only twice what James and I paid (each) for our economy class tickets for the last trip, so I was sorely tempted to fly business… except that by the time I’d cleared things with work, all the business tickets for October had been sold. Sad face.)

So, I picked some cheap dates, and booked the flights in practically no time at all. Easily the furthest in advance I’ve bought tickets for any of my holidays, I’d say. With that done, I intended to sit and think over the itinerary for a while. My biggest thought was that considering it’s early Autumn in Japan, I could head to the northern end of the country and enjoy the Autumn leaves, a popular autumnal pastime in Japan… until the moment I started idly penciling in some things that looked interesting, and discovered the place I considered visiting first actually had a major event in the very weekend I arrived – an event I had, up until that moment, thought took place in summer. And then I discovered another event was taking place in a different nearby town the following weekend. And suddenly it turned into a frenzied rush of booking hotels in case these events are popular and the hotels book out, and then I thought I might as well fill in the gaps, and then suddenly everything had been decided and booked before the end of July (aside from my JR Pass and travel SIM, which could only be ordered at most two months prior to the departure date).

In some ways, getting everything worked out so far in advance was a mistake, because I then basically spent all of my waking hours endlessly rehearsing every planned activity in my head, fretting about weather, and travel times and timetables, and whether I’d scheduled too much into every single day like I did back in December 2017. But on the flip side, booking so far in advance turned out to be beneficial when I discovered that the event I’m attending during my first weekend in Japan has reserved sitting areas, and tickets could only be reserved by calling the organisers on the phone on September 7th. So then I got to spend a few weeks fretting about having to hold a phone conversation in Japanese where I had to convey some fairly precise information, and receive other information back.

In the end, it went off without too much of a hitch (aside from one confusing moment when I thought the woman on the phone was asking for my e-mail address, but she was actually trying to give me theirs), and with the aid of an acquaintance in Japan to make the payment  for me, it’s all confirmed – I received my seating allocation last weekend. So now I can stop fretting about organising stuff, right? Right?

But in any case, before I head off for my next trip, I’d like to wrap up my last one with my usual list of stats and fun facts. I actually don’t know if anyone else finds this sort of thing interesting, but I’ve often consulted this data for my other trips whenever someone wants to know things like how much your typical visit to Japan costs, so it can be kinda useful to know. I’d like to include extra informative general tips and suggestions, but honestly nothing at all is coming to mind…

So, here goes:

• Posts:
• Total length: 48 A4 pages (without photos); 27,671 words; 154,474 characters. About three-quarters the length of the blog from 2017
• Average per post: 3.2 pages; 1844.7 words; 10,298.3 characters
• Longest post: Day 6, the day we went over the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route. 5.5 pages, 3253 words; 17,936 characters. Most of the rest of the posts were actually quite close to the average length.
• Money:
• Turns out the Qantas card only retains statements for the last twelve months – to get older statements, you need to call up and ask for them, and those statements represent the information a bit differently. So, I’m not sure how much I had loaded on the card when I started the trip, but in total, I spent 196,353 yen. A bit less than last time. Again, this includes hotels, spending money, non-JR Pass travel and so forth, but not airfares or the JR Pass.
• Hotels account for almost precisely half that – 96,866 yen (by comparison, half of my total expenditure is 98,176.5 yen), for an average of 6926 yen per night. Well, ish. To be precise, this is what I spent on all of our Toyoko Inn stays for both of us – I did the booking and the payment, since I had a membership card. When it came to our ryokan in Kyoto, though, James paid for that, as they’d only take cash, and he happened to have a lot of it on hand. He also paid for our meal at Ninja Akasaka, the only meal where we didn’t pay separately, and when we added those figures up, it came out to be almost the same as what I spent for the Toyoko Inn stays – just 4000 yen (or about $50 Australian) separated the figures, so I gave him 2000 yen and we called it even. (The Kyoto ryokan, incidentally, cost 77,760 yen for two nights, which is more than our three most expensive Toyoko Inns added together, which collectively represent eight nights. But hey, it was pretty luxurious. If I’ve done my sums correctly, the Toyoko Inns cost on average 4036 yen per night for each of us, while the Kyoto ryokan was 19,400 yen per night.)
• Spending money and souvenirs were the other half, or 99,487 yen, or 6632 yen per day – precisely 100 yen per day less than December 2017. That said, the Kobe beef dinner cost almost one-sixth of the total all on its own, and if you take that out, the average per day drops to 5591 yen.
• Photos:
• Total: 8558. About two-thirds of what I took last trip. I guess the fact that I’m not alone acts as a mitigating influence on my rampant photo-taking?
• Average: 570.5 per day
• Most photographic day: Day 9, with 899, when we visited Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, in Kyoto
• Steps:
• 238,326 steps, for 172.2 km, only about 12km less than last trip. 72.25 cm per step – one wonders how the Health app calculates it.
• Average: 15,888.4, or 11.48 km, per day
• Most steppish day: Day 12, when we strolled around half of Osaka, with 22,347 steps or 15.5 km
• Goshuin:
• Total: 26 – four fewer than last trip
• Average: 1.73 per day
• Most goshuinicious day: Day 9 (Enryaki-ji, again) by a fair margin.
• Stamps:
• Total: 56 – one fewer than last trip
• Average: 3.73 stamps per day (one day fewer, see)
• Most stampinominal day: Day 6 – Tateyame-Kurobe Alpine Route day – with 16
• Manhole Cards:
• Total: 3
• Average: 0.2 per day
• Most cardular day: Well… there’s a three-way tie, on the only three days I got cards, days 1, 4 and 15.

Welp. See you here again in ten days. I leave for my next trip on October 11th.

Pretty much everything in Japan has a mascot of some description. Companies, monuments, cities, even entire prefectures. I find they seem to fall into two categories: cute girls, and cute blobs. The “cute girls” category is basically anime-style anthropomorphised representations of the thing that they’re the mascot of (the OS-tan girls that went around the internet a few years ago are the perfect example of this – they were fanart rather than official mascots, to be precise, but the principle is the same), while the “cute blobs” category is basically… a cute blob, with a face (Kumamon, who’s currently going around the internet, is the perfect example of this – he’s Kumamoto Prefecture’s mascot). I find that cute girls are more often used by entities that would advertise on TV or in print (like this, for example), while cute blobs more often as a guy in a costume in the real world (like this). We’ve encountered several of both examples over the course of our trips – I mentioned Koya-kun in Koya-san on our first trip, and Hikonyan in Hikone back in December – but today we met Chiba-kun (a pun on Chiba-ken, “Chiba Prefecture” in Japanese). He’s a big red dog, because the shape of Chiba Prefecture on a map just happens to resemble a dog in profile, standing on its hind legs.

Chiba City is the capital and most populous city in Chiba Prefecture, part of the Greater Tokyo Area. It curiously doesn’t appear to be a dormitory city for Tokyo to the same extent as Yokohama is, despite being just 40km from the city centre. It’s home to Chiba Port, one of the largest sea ports in the nation, and Futa, a red panda who became an internet sensation by standing on its hind legs for up to ten seconds at a time. Also, Narita Airport is found in Chiba Prefecture, which is why we decided to stay here for this portion of our trip.

So, once again we started with breakfast, then it was sadly time to do our final pack up and check out. We left our suitcases at the hotel, though, because we still had most of the day to do some sightseeing.

I mentioned during my brief visit here last December that the Chiba Urban Monorail appeared to be running at stamp rally to encourage visitors to travel the monorail and see the sights of Chiba, accompanied by a booklet illustrated by Swedish manga writer Åsa Ekström, so today that’s exactly what we decided to do. And, spoiler alert, this wound up being a really good plan, because each of our stops for a stamp resulted in an extremely pleasant surprise.

Since our JR Passes expired yesterday, there was no waste in spending all day on a private line, so we purchased a day pass and hopped aboard. (The day pass was actually pretty good value for money – cost us less than a trip to the end of the line and back.) Aside from the stamp at Chiba Station, there were four other stamps to acquire, and we had about five hours in which to do it, so we decided to head for the furthest one first. Though before we did that, we first decided to head right for the end of the line, just because we could. Hopped off and admired the station, then hopped back on again.

Our first stop was two stops back down the line, and then a fifteen-minute walk away – the Kasori Shell Mounds. Shell mounds are prehistoric midden heaps (which is to say, ancient rubbish dumps) consisting primarily of discarded shells. They exist all around the world – including in Australia – but the ones in Japan were the first to be discovered, and they seem to be the most numerous. The Kasori Shell Mounds are generally regarded as the largest in the world – they date from the Jomon Period, the earliest named period in Japanese prehistory, which covers the time from around 14,000 to 300 BC. (The name “Jomon” means “cord-marked” from a characteristic style from that period of decorating pottery by rolling ropes around it while still soft.)

As we approached, we found class groups of elementary school students walking away, and when we reached the Shell Mounds Museum building on the site, we found volunteer museum guides giving hands-on demonstrations to students of how to start a fire with a bow drill. When the demonstration was done, we were asked if we’d like to have a try too, and they were very excited to have us do so, taking photos of us to put on their website. (I’ve thus far not been able to find exactly where those photos were posted, though, if it’s even been done yet. One of them gave us his card so that we could find the site, but rather than a URL, it’s just got a search keywords.) One guide even told us (in English) “you’ve made my day”. We were, incidentally, both successful at starting fire, so now we’ll be able to survive in the wild.

Once we’d thanked the guides (and they’d thanked us), we headed inside the museum for a bit of stickybeak, finding the stamp for the monorail stamp rally at the back of the room. It was pretty much all in Japanese, so we mostly just glanced at the pictures. One part had a demonstration of how the Jomon-style patterned pottery was made, and how different styles of cord wrapping produced different patterns. We picked up some flyers at the museum, and after we’d left, I realised that one of them said that the museum cost “a small entrance fee” whoops.

We then headed to look at the shell mounds themselves. The southern mound has a channel dug through the middle for archaeological investigation, and then roofed over so that visitors can walk through and see the layers of shells and dirt in cross section. At least, that was the theory – James thought the actual shells we could see were a fake veneer, but I wasn’t so sure.

Though the site had another mound to look at, and a reconstruction of an Edo period house, we decided it was time to move to our next destination, since we were on the  clock, so we headed back to the monorail station. I found it a little weird how being inside the station felt just like being inside any other station, even though it was basically a big room suspended on pillars over a roadway. This monorail has so much infrastructure – as I mentioned last time, it’s the world’s longest suspended monorail. It’s really useful, but I can only imagine the fuss they’d make in Sydney if anyone tried to install something similar, especially considering the fuss that got made over the dinky little one we used to have.

In any case, the next stamp was at Chiba Park, most of the way back towards Chiba Station. We hopped off the monorail and headed inside, walking down to the lakeside Renge-tei pavilion where the stamp would be. It was a very nice lake, and accessing the pavilion was done by walking along board walks over ponds by the lake – and one of the ponds had a duck leading a whole series of little ducklings.

We stopped there to take photos for a while, then went for a stroll around the lake, stopping briefly to visit Genshima Shrine nearby. It had a line of torii gates, though I don’t think it’s an Inari shrine.

Back at the monorail, we headed for the opposite end of the line, at Chiba Port Park. Chiba Port Park is kinda like Darling Harbour – formerly a shipping port, now a place for a day out. Complete with a pier for cruise ships, though there was no ship in port today. Also nearby is the Chiba Port Tower, a 125 metre tall tower with an observation deck at the top, which might have been nice to visit if we’d had more time. The stamp was located in the K’s Harbour building (think Darling Harbour’s Harbourside, though a fair bit smaller).

We decided to stop for lunch at Pier One, a restaurant in K’s Harbour (one explicitly mentioned in the stamp rally booklet), and were expecting fancy restaurant prices, only to discover that mains cost in the range of 1000 yen each (about $12 AUD), and came with free salad bar and drinks. I mean, it sure looked like a fancy restaurant, with a high ceiling, and private booths on the second floor, and a multi-storey fish tank covering one wall, but it was so incredibly affordable. James and I both had beef stew in a bread bowl (though James later confessed it might have been better to have seafood in a seaside restaurant) and got salad and drinks – James had Butterfly Pea tea (it’s blue!), while I had a drink called “Real Gold”, and I’ve still no idea quite what flavour it was (certainly not the flavour I was expecting from the colour, which was… well, gold).

Running a little short on time, we headed to our fourth and final stop, at the far end of the monorail’s branch line – specifically, the Chiba City Folk Museum, built in a reconstruction of Chiba Castle, which used to exist at the site. Another castle-outside-museum-inside thing, like Osaka Castle, though I guess since I was expecting it this time, it wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have much time to do more than catch the lift to the top floor and admire the view, sadly.

While the stamp I was after was located inside the castle, it was actually also available at the Inohana-tei teahouse next to where we’d entered the grounds, and when I stamped my booklet, the shopkeeper came out and gave me my reward for collecting all the stamps – a plastic document wallet with Åsa on the front and the monorail mascots on the back. I’d been thinking I’d have to go back to the tourist information centre and Chiba Station for that. He was quite impressed I’d come all the way from Australia.

We headed two stops back up the branch line to return to our hotel (since the branch line actually wraps right around the block where our hotel is located), grabbed our luggage, and continued on towards Chiba Station. I stopped by the tourist information centre all the same – because there’s a manhole card available here. Turns out the specific manhole cover depicted on the card is actually located at Chiba Shrine, where we’d gone the other day, but we didn’t really have time to go and revisit.

Back at Chiba Station, we hopped onto the Narita Line train for Narita Airport – without our JR Passes, booking a Narita Express would cost a fair bit more. It wasn’t too bad a ride on the regular train, though I did wind up standing for much of the trip. Most people got off at Narita Station, meaning I could sit for the last little bit.

Arriving at Narita Terminal 2-3 Station, I attempted to leave, and discovered my Suica card had insufficient credit left. Went to a top-up machine and discovered that I was all of twenty yen short. Twenty whole yen. Well, eighteen actually, but the machine rounded it up to twenty.

Narita Airport has a whole bank of capsule toy dispenser machines (i.e. they dispense little toys inside round plastic capsules, kinda like a Kinder Surprise toy but with better quality and no chocolate egg) to help people use up excess coinage – they’re incredibly popular over here, and in some places we saw entire shops filled with row after row of them – the name for them here is “gachapon”, which is onomatopoeia for the sound it makes when you use it (something like “clatter-clunk”). I decided to get one for the experience, but none of them contained things that particularly excited me, so I wound up getting one which contained a wooden puzzle.

Then we headed upstairs to check in, arriving just before the lines opened up to find a large queue already waiting. Checking in went off without a hitch, though. Then we went to browse the shops for a while, and checked out the outside observation decks, before heading through security.

During planning, I discovered a friend of mine would be landing in Narita for her own holiday literally an hour and a half before our flight took off – on closer inspection, we’d even be passing through adjacent gates. I’d hoped we’d have enough overlap time that we could meet up in the main concourse, but the big screens were already telling me I should be heading for the gate before her flight even landed. Instead, I found a place on the connecting passage (where the people mover used to run) where I had a clear view through the window at the people coming off arriving planes, and waited for her.

Soon, she appeared. The glass between us was completely soundproof, so we wound up pulling out our phones and connecting with a Facebook Messenger audio call, and let me tell you, that was an absolutely surreal experience. If for no other reason than that although we could see each other’s lips moving in real-time, there was delay of about a second or two before we could hear the sound over our phones. We felt like we were in a prison talking to an inmate, though we couldn’t quite decide which of us was the visitor and which was the inmate.

Before too long, it was time for me to head for my gate and her to head for the real world, so we decided to part ways. At the gate, James and I were given new boarding passes – at the seats we’d booked, one of the screens wasn’t working, so they were going to swap us with the passenger seated alone on the other side of the plane, but they hadn’t checked with her if that was all right at the time we’d checked in.

And then we boarded. We were sitting in the very first row of economy class – originally, I’d booked the last row in the forward economy section, as that’s all that was available when I booked the tickets (and so that we could recline without fear of hitting someone behind us, but when I checked again the other day, it seemed more seats had become available. They weren’t too bad – kinda like exit row seats, but with not so much leg room.

They served dinner after we took off – I had pasta – then we settled down to sleep. Or at least attempt to. I slept about as well as I usually do on planes – which is to say, not at all – so I watched a few movies instead. I wasn’t able to find anything new that I’d been wanting to watch, so I re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road and then Star Wars: The Last Jedi, before noticing Wonder. They served us a breakfast of a muffin and a tray of fruit before landing – James commented it was practically the first fruit we’d eaten all holiday (aside from strawberries or banana slices being used as garnishes).

Soon, we were landing at Melbourne Airport. Oh yes, we flew home via Melbourne, incidentally. We collected our luggage so we could go through customs (no issues) then had to go re-check it. I decided pop out en route for a photo, and discovered it was cold enough to see my breath – I actually don’t remember ever seeing my breath in Japan, even in the snow on the Alpine Route, though I confess I wasn’t really looking for it.

We pulled our Japan-Melbourne luggage tags off our suitcases ready for the new tags to add, only to realise the tags were actually for Japan-Sydney-via-Melbourne, and the machine wouldn’t let us print new ones, so we had to get an attendant to print them out for us.

Bags deposited, we headed for our new gate. For our domestic leg, we were in the second row of economy class. I decided to re-watch Rogue One (on the iPad Qantas app), but somehow actually managed to doze off while we were taxiing, waking up in the air. They served us a snack. Only managed to get half the movie watched before we were already landing in Sydney (we approached from the north, for some reason, so we got a nice view across the CBD).

After a walk of about half a kilometre to reach the express pickup zone, James’ girlfriend gave me a lift home. At the Tim Tam I’d picked up on the plane to Japan (and carried everywhere in my camera bag since) while waiting. And the holiday was over.

I spent Saturday forcing myself to stay awake so I could get to sleep at usual bedtime, and aside from dozing off a few times, I managed to do it. By now I already feel adjusted to Sydney time again.

Not sure when I’ll visit Japan again. Soon, I hope. Much sooner than another seven and a half years, for sure.

Today’s photo count: Five hundred and eighty (includes the photos taken Saturday and Sunday)

Today’s pedometer count: 15,139 steps, for 10.8km (does not include steps taken on Saturday or Sunday)

Today’s goshuin count: None

Today’s stamp count: Aside from the stamp rally stamps, which I stamped in my book all on one page (as well as in the special booklet), I got four – two at the Kasori Shell Mounds (one of which I over-inked), Chiba Castle, and Narita Airport. And it just now occurred to me I never checked if the JR Chiba Station had a stamp…