J³ (James, Joel, Japan)

It’s almost crazy just how much bicycle parking you find here. People ride bikes all over the place, and when you ride to work (or to the train station), you need somewhere secure to store it, and people are happy to provide it. Bicycle parking stations range from a bunch of racks, to fenced-in areas, to large rooms attached to underground walkways, all the way up to entire buildings literally the size of multi-floor car parking stations, entirely to house bicycles. And to think that one of the reasons I never really rode my bike to school was because there was nowhere at all at the other end to put it.

Today, after breakfast, we checked out of our hotel in Chigasaki and headed for our next destination. As an added bonus, today was actually sunny.

First, we headed into Tokyo for the first time this trip, taking the local Tokaido Line train the whole way. Then it was off to the shinkansen – the Hokuriku Shinkansen. It’s named after the Hokuriku region in Japan (literally the “northands” region, consisting of the coastline along the Sea of Japan, so we basically travelled across the country from south to north). The Hokuriku Shinkansen was originally opened in 1997, under the name “Nagano Shinkansen”, since it terminated in Nagano, but it was extended to Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture almost exactly three years ago, in March 2015. They’re planning to extend it until it reaches Osaka, but that’s not predicted to reach completion until 2045.

In any case, the trains running on the Hokuriku Shinkansen are called Hakutaka (“white hawk”). Tragically, we were too late to get a seat on the train I was hoping to get, so we were given tickets for the next one an hour later. We took the time to have a bit of a poke outside Tokyo Station (since James’ last visit was back in 2010 when the building was still being refurbished). We also took the time to peek into a shopping centre across the road, which had a huge artwork in the middle of the floor made of coloured sand and flower petals and stems, celebrating the centre’s fifth anniversary.

After a while, we hopped on our train. As with all of our shinkansen rides so far, it was smooth and without issue, depositing us in Toyama, our next destination, after a few hours. When we hopped off the train, we discovered it was much colder than it was back in Chigasaki, so we scrambled for our jumpers.

To insert an expository paragraph here, Toyama is the capital and largest city in Toyama Prefecture, with a population of 420,000. It was established as a city (in the official, legal sense) on April 1st, 1889, as one of the first thirty cities in Japan, but the area has been a point of strategic importance since prehistoric times.

Unfortunately, getting the later train meant we were in for a late lunch, and there were no bento boxes available on the train – in hindsight, we should have bought some ekiben at Tokyo before we left, because after a brief stop at the hotel to deposit our luggage, we found that almost every food place was closed.

Eventually, we found a crepe shop which was also offering savoury crepes, so we decided to eat there, only to discover after queueing for a fair while that they were no longer being sold today. There was a whole pile of school girls in the shop, so it was clearly a popular place. Standing in line with the smell of crepes, however, had given me a craving for a crepe, so I bought a cinnamon-banana crepe, without stopping to think that’d mean James would still need to find lunch somewhere else.

James did eventually find somewhere else, a place selling kamameshi, a dish consisting of rice, meat and vegetables all cooked together in a small pot. I sat with him for a bit while we considered options – there were two places I vaguely had in mind for sightseeing, one on each side of the station, and with our reduced sightseeing time, we wouldn’t really have time for both. So we decided to divide our forces: I’d head north, to Kansui Park, while James would head south, to the Toyama Castle Gardens.

My reason for heading north was because Kansui Park is right next to the Toyama City Water and Sewage Bureau, from which I could obtain the Toyama Manhole Card. So I did. And he also gave me a coaster, and a bottle of “Toyama Water”. It was weird, though – in order to get the card, I had to actually go up to the third floor, and enter the actual Sewage Department offices, where all the clerks were sitting at desks working away.

But anyway, card acquired, I headed over to Kansui Park. Situated along the banks of the Fugen Canal, Kansui Park is a broad green space fairly dominated by the imposing Tenmon-kyo bridge – it’s a fairly standard flat beam bridge, except the pylons tower three storeys over the bridge, and the approach stairs on either side curve up and over like two unrelated arch bridges. Each pylon tower has a lift allowing you to easily get to an observation balcony at the top, so I went up for a look.

Kansui Park also contains an island in the middle, a Roman-style amphitheatre, and a Starbucks branch apparently renowned for being one of the more beautiful ones in Japan. I walked all around the park looking at things. There was even a promenade lined by cherry threes, but these were all leafy, the blossoms long gone. Sad face. Hopefully James will be able to blog about his trip to the castle at some point as well.

I wandered back to the station, and met up with James at another park near to where I bought my crepe to take part in a Pokémon Go raid battle with a whole crowd of men in suits, then we headed off to find a place for dinner, eating in a small place on a side street offering a bunch of battered and fried things – prawns, horse mackerel, scallops, even oysters when in-season. We both had tonkatsu, pork cutlet, but James had a mixed set that came with prawn as well. Everything comes with sides of miso soup and rice. Quite tasty.

We headed to our hotel to finish checking in and moved into our room. (We’re staying in Toyoko Inn again. There’s actually a second Toyoko Inn in the city, just over the road from the station – it’s brand new, literally, in the sense that it (sadly) doesn’t open until this upcoming Saturday.) And more to the point, get warmed up – it’s starting to get quite cold outside, about 9°C at the moment. Almost thinking of thermals tomorrow. Weather forecast is for cloud tomorrow, but rain tomorrow night continuing into Wednesday, which is not great…

Today’s photo count: three hundred and one.

Today’s pedometer count: 16,563 steps, for 12.1 km.

Today’s goshuin count: Nil

Today’s stamp count: Just one, Toyama Station.

Chigasaki, where we’re staying now, is a city in Kanagawa Prefecture. For a long time, only pasture and farmland has existed here – the old Edo-period Tokaido Road, joining Kyoto with Tokyo, passed through here, but the area lacked a post town. It wasn’t until the Tokaido train line was built in the Meiji period – including a station at Chigasaki – that development in the area really started. Today it has a population of 240,000, and largely serves as a bedroom community for Tokyo and Yokohama. It’s also a popular swimming destination, and is known as the birthplace of surfing in Japan, and is a centre of Hawaiian culture in Japan – to that end, it’s had a sister-city relationship with Honolulu since 2004. In all honesty, though, my choice of this hotel when placing bookings was largely one of necessity – pretty much every other hotel in Tokyo and Kanagawa was already booked out.

So, today’s plan was to climb another mountain – this time Mount Takao near Hachioji. Last night’s weather projections for today weren’t looking too promising though – rain was predicted overnight with 100% chance, but since the probability of rain plummeted after 10am, I made the call last night that we’d go for it after all.

Turned out that was the right call after all – although it was absolutely bucketing down over breakfast, it stopped raining shortly before we were ready to go, and didn’t start again the rest of the day. I still carted my umbrella around all day, though.

Getting to Hachioji from Chigasaki involved catching four separate trains. Our first train was the Sagami Line, which starts at Chigasaki Station, which is one of my chief reasons for selecting Chigasaki specifically from the handful of hotels with availability. The Sagami Line almost feels like a rural line – single-tracked the whole way (with passing loops about every second station) through scattered houses and small farm plots. For some reason, I just the feel of those little single-track stations. So quaint. Also, as per what seems to be usual for rural train lines, it has manually-operated door open/close buttons.

The Sagami Line got us most of the way there, then we had to change at Hashimoto to the Yokohama Line for the last few stops to Hachioji, then change to the Chuo Line for two stops to Takao, then change to the private Keio line for the one stop to Takaosanguchi. It was, I confess, a tiny bit annoying to get most of the way on one train, but then have to make three transfers for the last little bit. The JR and Keio Takao stations actually share an exit, and so had three rows of ticket gates arranged in a Y shape – one row for entering/exiting the JR station, one for doing the same for the Keio station, and one row to pass directly from the JR station to the Keio station. Since our JR passes cover our JR travel, and we pay for private-line travel with our Suica cards, we unfortunately had to exit through the JR gates and re-enter through the Keio gates rather than make the direct transfer.

In any case, we eventually made it to Mount Takao. Standing 599 metres tall, and located barely an hour from central Tokyo, it’s a popular hiking area, seeing about 2.5 million visitors annually. It’s also the home of Yakuo-in, a temple which was supposedly founded in the year 744, making it only a little bit newer than Nihon-ji from yesterday. The mountain is also regarded as a home for Tengu, shinto gods or supernatural beings who take the form of men with looooong noses.

Four paths lead to the top (though two of them have fair sections of overlaps with other path). Route 1 is the main path, paved the whole way and visiting all of the important sites up the mountain. As an added bonus, Route 1 also has the option of skipping the most strenuous lower section by taking either a funicular or a chair lift about a third of the way up.

We elected to take the chair lift – slower than the funicular, but much less crowded, and more open to the fresh air and the sounds of nature. Downside: no safety bar, and nothing but our grip preventing stuff from falling. And once or twice we had to hold our feet up so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. I did like the boarding procedure, though – instead of just standing there waiting for the chair to whack you in the back of the knees, there’s a moving footpath, so you’re moving at the same speed as the chair.

Once at the top of the chairlift, we decided it was time to stop for lunch. We ate at a place with quite a nice view selling “Tengu dogs” – basically hot dogs where the sausages were about twice the length of the bun, representing the long nose of a Tengu. Yeah, not really traditional Japanese fare, but it was there, and we weren’t sure what else would be available (though it turned out there were shops and eateries pretty much the whole way along). Pretty tasty all the same.

After lunch, we headed on up the road. It was quite a lovely road, shaded by cedars on both sides. Passing though the Joshin-mon gate, we encountered a small procession of monks coming the other way. Later, we climbed up the “Men’s Slope”, a staircase with 108 steps, with each step correlating to one of the 108 earthly desires (contrasted with the “Women’s Slope”, which runs parallel, and is just a hill). At the top, there’s the Busshari Stupa, a Thai-styled building representing Japanese-Thailand relationships and containing Buddhist relics. There was a monk in front burning green branches to produce large amounts of smoke for some purpose I was not entirely aware.

Nearby, we decided to stop for another snack – black sesame dango (= dumplings). James had his with red-bean paste, but I just had regular soy-based sauce.

Moving on from there, we reached Yakuo-in proper. It enshrines Fudo Myo-o, the Unmoving King. We admired all of the temple buildings while climbing the stairs past them. I was intrigued by mini-shrine to pray for relationships that was full of large numbers of little bells.

After a whole lot more hiking, we eventually reached the summit, and there was a spectacular view from there. If the air was clearer, we may have been able to see Chigasaki where we’d come from. To my complete surprise, though, one thing we did manage to see was Mount Fuji. Albeit only just – sadly there was too much cloud cover over the mountain to get a good photo of it. Apparently Mount Takao is a popular place to view Diamond Fuji – on a few days each winter, the sun rises directly behind Fuji when viewed from Takao, making it appear like a diamond setting on a ring, or something. That’s Fuji in the last photo.

In any case, we stopped for a breather at the top, and bought some fruit salad ice creams for a snack, then it was time to start heading down.

For a change, we decided to take Route 4 for the descent. An unpaved path which was (in most places) little more than a flat space cut into a steeply sloping mountainside, it was very green and extremely serene. We only saw a few other people the whole way. It also includes the only suspension bridge on Mount Takao.

Route 4 rejoins Route 1 just above the funicular and chairlift stations, so we decided to take the funicular back to the bottom. It’s actually Japan’s steepest funicular, with a maximum slope of 31.8° near the top – which, I confess, was a little bit scary tipping over onto when we were starting the descent.

Back at the bottom, we headed back to the train station, and managed to get a fairly rapid series of transfers to arrive back at Chigasaki Station (save for one moment at Takao Station when the train stopped on a different platform to what I was expecting, meaning we had to scramble a bit). One thing I was quite entertained by was a row of restaurants along platform 1 at Hashimoto Station – they have doors facing both the platform and the street, and so to prevent people from passing through the restaurants to avoid the ticket gates, each shop has a counter running down the middle separating it into two separate sections.

It’s kinda fun people-watching on the way – at one point, a school student boarded with a traditional archery bow, so long that it scraped the ceiling with propped upright, and wearing traditional archer’s uniform.

Back at Chigasaki, we decided to have dinner at Yoshinoya over on the other side of the station. I’d already eaten at Yoshinoya on my last visit and enjoyed it a lot, so I was torn between whether I wanted to enjoy it again, or whether I wanted to try somewhere new. We ate there in the end – as mentioned previously, it’s a chain of restaurants serving in gyuudon, thin-sliced beef on rice. I had beef cooked Korean galbi style with cheese, while James had a regular gyuudon set, with salad, miso, and grated yam.

Dinner done, we headed back to the hotel. This will be our last night in Chigasaki – we’re off to a new city tomorrow.

Today’s photo count: Five hundred and seventy-six

Today’s step count: 13,731 steps, for 10.3km.

Today’s goshuin count: Just the one, Yakuo-in.

Today’s stamp count: I managed to score one from the JR Takao Station, but our other transfers were so fast I didn’t get the chance to go looking for the stamps. Keio also had mini-stamps all up and down Mount Takao – I got four, which I put all on the same page, but I passed two others without noticing them, even though I had a map showing where they’d be.

Yesterday’s post now has photos.

On the subject of how all Japanese names have meanings, thanks to the meaning inherent in the kanji used to write them, a common name traditionally given to one’s first son is Ichiro. It means… “first son”. I mean, you can add some kind of virtue to it as well, like Yuichiro = brave first son, but it still means “first son”. Actually, there’s a whole series of these names – Ichiro (first), Jiro (second), Saburo (third), Shiro (fourth), Goro (fifth) and so on. I couldn’t even imagine naming someone “first son” in English. Girls got it a bit easier – traditional girls names tended to be nature related, like Hana (flower), Fuji (wisteria) or Ishi (stone), or were blessings, like Chiyo (a thousand generations), Momo (one hundred) or Toyo (abundance).

But moving on. We both slept quite well last night, though I found myself awake about an hour earlier than intended. Either way, we headed down to breakfast in the hotel lobby. I again forgot my camera. Same sort of stuff as every Toyoko Inn breakfast – rice, miso soup, assorted pickled items, something with meat, and bread for toasting. Again, I forgot the camera, so these photos come from the phone.

After breakfast, we headed out for our first day of actual sightseeing. Specifically, we were going to visit Nokogiriyama, which I attempted to visit on my last trip but was unable to, thanks to the weather. Nokogiriyama, which means “saw-tooth mountain” is located in Chiba Prefecture, across Tokyo Bay from Kanagawa Prefecture – to get there from our hotel in Chigasaki, it involved two trains, a bus, and a ferry.

Most of the summit of Nokogiriyama is the home of Nihon-ji, a temple that was founded in the year 725 (in June, according to the temple map, with curious specificity), making it possibly one of the oldest temples in Japan. During the Edo period, the side of the mountain facing Tokyo served as a huge stone quarry, and so much stone was mined that it actually changed the shape of the mountain, giving it the shape that it is now named after.

In any case, we caught our trains and bus pretty much without issue, and soon we were in Kurihama – my first time to return to a place I’d already been in Japan (aside from obvious places like Narita Airport or Tokyo Station, or the ryokan I stayed at in Kyoto). For this trip, our ferry was the Shirahama-maru. It felt a little bit smaller than the Kanaya-maru, which I took last time, and possibly a little bit older, but still extremely nice all the same. Very comfy chairs. Spotted the Kanaya-maru doing the reverse trip on the way.

Once in Kanaya, we wandered through the town a few times looking for somewhere nice to eat, but nothing was grabbing our attention. Eventually, we decided to head up the Nokogiriyama Ropeway and eat at the “cafeteria” that the brochure said we would find at the top. And fortunately, today it wasn’t too windy for it to be running. It was quite a spectacular trip up.

The ropeway ticket is printed on surprisingly heavy cardboard, and is marked as used by the attendant clipping a notch in one side with a special tools, like all train tickets used to be in Japan, making it feel quite historic.

The upper ropeway station is a four-storey building with a a lookout on the roof, and the view from up there was quite amazing. The cafeteria was on the topmost floor, it also had quite a view from the windows. I had pork-on-rice with a side of miso soup, and James had curry rice. Most tasty.

Lunch done, we headed into the temple proper. First stop on the walk, the Hundred-Shaku Kannon. Carved into the wall of a quarried ravine, it’s a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon, and it’s a hundred shaku tall. Hence the name. A shaku is an old Japanese measurement roughly equal to a foot, so it’s about thirty metres tall. It was carved in WWII to commemmorate the lost soldiers, but today it serves as a patron of safety on the roads. My first introduction to this place was when this statue in appeared the Japan special of Top Gear, being used as a finish line for a race between the hosts.

I think what I loved most about it was the absolute serenity of the whole area, both the path leading up to it, and the actual open space in front of it. They were surrounded on all sides by tall rock faces, but plants were growing everywhere, and the birds were chirping.

Next stop, Jigoku-Nozoki, meaning “the viewpoint into hell”, though I’m not too clear on what was supposed to be so hellish about the view. It’s this small rock platform which is cantilevered out over the cliff (though when you’re standing on it, it looks plenty solid). There’s actually a structure nearby that you can view it from, so James and I took photos of each other from there.

From that point, very nearly the highest point on the mountain, we headed down a long, looong line of stairs to see the Nihon-ji Daibutsu. At thirty metres tall, the Daibutsu (“big buddha”) is described in various places as the largest pre-modern, stone-carved buddha statues in Japan, which seems like it’s been excessively qualified to make it sound more impressive, but in actual fact it towers over the eighteen-metre statue in Todaiji (which we saw on our first trip), and the thirteen-metre statue at Kotoku-in in Kamakura (which I saw on my second).

I also saw some pink flowers blooming nearby. I went to check them out, wondering if maybe they’d be some late-bloomong sakura, but on closer inspection, I rather suspect it was a peach or plum tree. I’m no botanist, though. Rather pretty all the same. In addition, we saw a statue of Jizo with a whole mound of tiny Jizos standing around its base – turns out you buy them from the temple, write your wish on them, and leave them for Jizo to grant.

Once we were done there (and got my belated goshuin), we strolled gently back up the stairs on the other side of the complex to return to the ropeway station. We managed to get back there at 3:55, thinking the final trip would be at 5pm (according to the ropeway brochue), but we discovered when we got there that it’d actually be at 4pm. That was cutting it close, whew. But that’s another thing I can check off my stuff-to-do-in-Japan list.

For much of the time from lunch to here, it was attempting to rain, despite the weather report promising only a 40% chance in the late afternoon. I’d bought an el cheapo umbrella in the morning in an attempt to employ the anti-rain magic of lugging an umbrella around all day, but unfortunately I’d forgotten that if the weather is too windy to use the umbrella – as it was today – that magic gets negated. Fortunately, it never rained particularly hard, or for very long.

At the bottom, we walked back to the ferry port just in time for the 4:30 ferry (Shirahama-maru, again), hopped on the bus waiting for us, and then got on the train. Finally learnt what the strange racks I’d seen on the ferry were for – golf bags. And on this trip, they were full of them.

At Ofuna Station, we decided to head out of the station to find some dinner, eventually settling on a place called “Obon de Gohan” which specialised in teishoku cuisine, or meal sets – a main dish with a bunch of different sides. James had some kind of battered seared tuna, and I had nanban-style fried chicken with a miso-based tartar sauce. Very tasty.

Also, the waitress who took our order could speak pretty good English, having spent three years studying at university in the Gold Coast. She was quite impressed with my Japanese, which I kept using (a) from force of habit, and (b) because I was reading from the Japanese menu (they’d only given us one English menu, and James was holding it).

With dinner done, we headed back to the hotel. Currently I’m looking at tomorrow’s forecast (100% chance of rain at night, falling to 40% at breakfast time, and nothing the rest of the day) and pondering whether or not I need to modify tomorrow’s plans…

Today’s photo count: three hundred and seventy-five.

Today’s pedometer count: 16,260 steps, or 11.9 km. James’ smart watch is also telling him he’s climbed the equivalent of eighty storeys in stairs.

Today’s goshuin count: One – Nihon-ji, finally.

Today’s stamp count: Four – Kurihama Station, a second stamp that was at Kurihama which I’m not sure what it was for and stamped poorly anyway, the Shirahama-maru, and two little stamps at the Nokogiriyama Ropeway which I decided to put on one page (one of which I stamped sideways).

Come one, come all, for our third visit to Japan! Or possibly in James’ case, second-and-a-halfth – he had a stopover here one time.

For a change, we flew overnight instead of overday – our flight took off from Sydney at 8:50pm. Like I mentioned in my blog last trip, I thought I’d try an overnight flight and just tough it out through the jetlag. As an added bonus, I managed to score exit row seats for this leg. The flight actually wasn’t too bad – the time pretty much flew by… uh, no pun intended. I watched Home first over dinner – I’d pre-ordered dinner for both of us (barramundi with garlic and miso sauce with rice) but for some reason they didn’t seem to have registered that, so we just had to ask for it off the trolley like normal.

Then I tried to sleep for a while, but slept about as poorly as I usually do on planes. Watched Ferdinand in bouts between naps. James tried to watch Greatest Showman, but his headphones were working so badly that he just gave up and read for a while, then slept – he seemed to be doing a better job of it than me, actually, though I didn’t wake him up to ask how it was going.

As is typical, I finally fell into a proper snooze right before they brought up the lights for breakfast – a bowl of Just Right with milk, plus a piece of coconut and banana bread. I decided to eschew my usual stick of gum on landing to test whether my last ear-pain-free landing without gum last time was a fluke, and again it was free of pain – wonder if it’s the gum-chewing that  caused the pain. Also watched the first episode of The New Adventures of Monkey. We landed in Haneda a bit early, at 5am Tokyo time.

We blearily stumbled off the plane, and headed through customs fairly smoothly, though there was a long line, and James wound up stuck behind a guy with lots of issues, so I had plenty of time to stroll to the baggage claim and retrieve both of our suitcases (after almost grabbing two other suitcases that were identical to mine). Then we headed out to get our Japan Rail Passes.

As per previous standard practice, the JR Pass gives free travel on all JR trains save for the very fastest shinkansen trains, but it’s only available to foreigners, and you need to order it before you arrive in Japan. Unfortunately, the exchange office in Haneda doesn’t open until 6:45, and we were through customs by about 6am, so we joined the queue, which was already quite long, and waited.

(Our other option was to exchange the pass at Yokohama Station, but the office there doesn’t open until 9:30am, so we’d have had to wait around even longer.)

In any case, we eventually managed to feed through the queue and got our passes. The exchange office helpfully had a chart of cherry blossom sites in Tokyo, and every single one had already ended. Sad face. Then I went to get some cash out at the Seven Bank ATM, and I discovered I’d clean forgotten my PIN, and when I went to use the app to display my PIN for me, I discovered I’d forgotten exactly how I worded the answer to my security question, so I had to call the help line – three times, because first we got disconnected, then my Skype credit ran out in mid-call. Not a fuss I expected to come across.

So eventually, with money in hand and our Suica smart travel cards topped up, we headed downstairs for the private-like Keikyu Airport Express to Yokohama. For this part of the trip we’re staying at a Toyoko Inn in Chigasaki, which is a part of Kanagawa Prefecture (reminder, that’s a prefecture just outside of Tokyo proper, but a part of the Greater Tokyo Area). Since it was still barely 9am, we couldn’t check in to our hotel yet, we decided we’d make the half-hour train trip to the hotel to deposit our luggage rather than pay for a coin locker.

So at Yokohama, we changed to the JR Tokaido line for Chigasaki, and wound up standing, which after all the standing in line we’d already done was getting to be a bit much… and then the train just stopped, in between two stations. My JR East train status app said “signal inspection”. This is starting to become a pattern for me. Eventually, we arrived in Chigasaki Station, when suddenly the emergency brakes were applied, throwing a few people off their feet – including one elderly woman, who (fortunately for her) landed on me.

But we soon arrived at the hotel without further issue. I’d already practiced the walk to this hotel – and our others – on Google maps, and for this one it’s actually quite simple – follow the overpass from the station until it runs out, then take the underpass under the major intersection, then turn left. Managed to check in without too much trouble – that I had a Toyoko Inn membership card and James didn’t seemed to confuse the woman to no end, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that James’ name doesn’t appear on the booking anywhere (it never asks for the names of other people in the room, just the person booking).

Check-in done, we decided to head out at about 10:45 for an early lunch, considering our breakfast had been at about 4am. We found a family restaurant named Saizeriya literally right next to my hotel – and I was quite surprised to find it actually exists, having thought it was a fictional chain for some reason – but it wouldn’t open until 11. We decided to wander for a bit to pass the time, but in the process came across another restaurant, named “Surprised Donkey”, which specialises in hamburg steaks, and which (perhaps more importantly) was already open.

Loved the internal decor of this place. And the menu was seriously huge – as in, physically, in the sense that the main part was a fold-out board probably two feet high that stood upright on the table, which came with a pile of A3-sized menus with sets, specials, and breakfast- or lunch-only items. I decided to have a “fondue-style cheese hamburg” (which basically was covered with cheese), while James had a hamburg-and-diced-steak combo set with sides of salad and rice. I did the ordering in Japanese, and it went off almost completely flawlessly – save when she asked me about one of the options for James’ meal, and I simply couldn’t figure out what word she was saying. Eventually, I had her type it into my Japanese dictionary.

Lunch done, we headed back to the station so we could return to Yokohama for some actual sightseeing. We managed to get seats for this trip, fortunately, though that may have been a mistake – both of us immediately started dozing off. I was able to force myself to stay awake, but had to nudge James awake more than once when it looked like he was about to settle onto his seat neighbour. Yokohama Station caused us such woes on our first trip here, when we failed to realised that not all Yokohama-line trains stop at Yokohama station (despite the name), but today we passed through it multiple times without a hitch, despite our other issues with trains.

We’d always planned to take it easy today so we wouldn’t over-strain our tired selves. First stop: visit the Kinokinuya at Yokohama Station for a new station stamp book. After a quick browse around the place, we headed off on the train to see Yokohama Chinatown. First, I got off the train a stop early, to visit the Yokohama City Offices.

Why? What was to be found there? Surprise bonus collectible for this trip: manhole cards.

The manhole covers in Japan are frequently quite artistic and decorative, and considering how much Japan likes its collectibles (gotta catch ‘em all!) they decided to release a set of free cards showcasing some of the nicest covers. They turned out to be a roaring success, quickly distributing over a million cards – leading the head of the sewage board to comment that this is the first time anything given out by the sewage industry topped a million takers. And a huge expansion of the number of different cards available

The list of where cards can be acquired is available online, so I researched which ones I could pass nearby without having to alter travel plans by anything more than getting off the train a stop early, for example. Turns out there’s a list of about seven that I could probably reach quite easily, and another five that would be fairly simple if plans managed to take us that way. Don’t know that I’ll be visiting all of the seven, but today I got Yokohama’s. The back of the card has a bit of the history of it.

Card acquired, we then walked around the perimeter of Yokohama Stadium, and it turns out that even though we’d missed the cherry blossoms, there were still plenty of flowers blooming, as the gardens around the concourse were filled with blooming flowers. Also some kind of handicrafts fair, where we saw people selling a whole range of hand-crafed goods. Even some alpine horns.

Soon, we reached Yokohama Chinatown. Opened in 1859, today it’s the largest Chinatown in all Japan. We wandered the streets for a bit admiring the buildings and decorations, and being sorely tempted by all the people selling steamed buns and other dumplings, but soon it was time to move on.

Next stop, a scenic area of Yokohama’s shoreline – specifically, some of the bits that used to be a working shipping port, but today are known as Minato Mirai 21 (short for “Harbour of the Future in the 21st Century”). The old red brick warehouses are still there, but today the area is dominated by the Yokohama Landmark Tower, which, up until the Tokyo Skytree was finished a few years ago, was the tallest building in Japan. It’s also now the home of the Tokyo Cruise Terminal, and we happened to see the Diamond Princess in port today.

After wandering around there for a while – including taking part in a Pokemon Go legenary raid and browsing through the Yokohama Pokemon Centre (basically just a shop selling Pokemon merchandise). With that done, we decided it was time to head back to the hotel, finish checking in, then head out to dinner. Only juuust managed to avoid coming back smack in the middle of rush hour, but we were certainly sharing our train with large numbers of school students.

We found a place near our hotel selling “raumen”, though I still haven’t worked out exactly how ramen differs from raumen. It was quite tasty all the same though. Seemed to be more heavily based on its original Chinese roots than other ramen I’ve had. Sadly, I clean forgot to bring my camera with me for dinner, so I had to make do with a few photos taken from my phone.

Time for bed, though. When I started this, it was about ten to eight, and I was astonished at how early it was – I felt like I’d been up for ages which, to be honest, is pretty much true, and it’s getting near impossible to keep my eyes open any longer. Time for an early night…

Today’s photo count: Two hundred and seventy-three, including the ones I took on my phone (includes photos I took on Thursday)

Today’s pedometer count: 16,634 steps, or 11.7 km (doesn’t include steps I took on Thursday)

Today’s goshuin count: None, but then, I wasn’t planning to visit any temples.

Today’s stamp count: Four – Yokohama Station, Kannai Station, Sakuragicho Station and Chigasaki Station. Actually, James also managed to spot the stamp at Haneda Airport, which I’d forgotten to look for last time, but sadly at the time I had neither a stamp book nor anything else I could apply the stamp to.

So, it’s finally time once again. James and I are off to Japan tomorrow evening. Itinerary is all laid out, and hopefully I’ve done a better job of judging how long things will take.

We’ll be flying out on an overnight flight, and landing first thing in the morning, then the intent is to do as much easy sightseeing as we can manage before we just get too tired to continue. Expect to see my usual daily posts.

I’ve had some pretty good luck in Japan so far as weather goes on my previous two trips. I’m quite hoping that will continue, but the current forecast for this weekend in Tokyo is rain both days – since our plans for both days involve outdoor activities only, that concerns me a fair bit. Guess we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope.

Allons-y!