Kenroku'en Under Snow

We post a lot of pictures of Kenroku'en around here.  One of the three most famous gardens in Japan and located all of a $3.50 thirty-minute bus ride away, and we're basically working on seeing it in all four seasons, in both daylight and lit up at night.  Last week we got a lot of snow, even by New England standards, and as the storm stretched from Wednesday through Friday night, we could go to Kenroku'en first thing Saturday morning and see it under fresh snow.  We might not get another such chance while we're here, but we made good use of this one.

Yes, we got pictures of the iconic Kenroku'en lantern, again.

We found the garden surprisingly uncrowded for such a rare opportunity, though we did figure that as most Japanese work at least Saturday morning it was not really the weekend for most people.  A large percentage of the people there were carrying cameras large enough to distinguish them as amateur or professional photographers (as opposed to the general public) even in the camera-crazy culture of Japan.  I don't think there's a heck of a lot more to say about it, except that we had a good time and took a lot of pictures, so check out the rest of them on Flikr.

I left my sunglasses at work so I was without for this trip.

Winter Storms

Wintertime in Kanazawa is full of sleet, slush, freezing rain, and this winter, snow. There's also a lot of wind. Half of the time an umbrella during a sleet storm is more hassle than help, especially when the wind decides to change direction and invert your umbrella halfway down the street. There are some pretty cool thunderstorms with snow and sleet, though it's fairly unnerving to walk to work in a snowy thunderstorm.


Our apartment building is quite old. We can tell when large trucks go by from the shaking of the walls, and can only tell the difference between trucks and earthquakes by the length of time of the shaking. The winter storms, with their howling winds, also cause our building to shake. Even the inner doors tend to rattle when the wind is blowing.


In addition to being woken up by shrieking winds and rattling doors, there has been quite a bit of snow buildup this winter. When the snow falls off of the roof on the back of the building, it hits our porch first on its way down, which also causes a loud, abrupt, and undesired awakening when it happens in the middle of the night. Whether it was the snow, the wind, or some other phenomenon, we awoke one morning to discover most of our pictures shifted in their frames by the shaking of the building.  Nothing a little tape wouldn't cure, but we felt it was a suitable demonstration of the magnitude of shaking our apartment sometimes does.

Now we've taped all of the pictures in the frames. I find it interesting that neither of the two frames of my friends and family were shifted, but they may have been taped down originally. At least the frames themselves have proven to be stable on the walls!

Dezomeshiki

On the first Sunday on or after January 5th, the local volunteer firemen show off their skills with the first exercise of the year. We didn't know about it last year, so went this year to see what goes on. 1100 volunteer firemen get together and show off their skills, and I stood around in the rain for over an hour to see what they could do.


First, as with all ceremonies, there were quite a few salutes, speeches, and other formalities. The firemen were lined up by company, with I believe different flags for each different section, and saluted many, many times.


After about half an hour of saluting, standing at attention, and being rained on, they broke formation and set up a bunch of 2.5 meter tall ladders. Originally, the job of the firemen was to tear down houses near fires so that the fire wouldn't spread. Therefore, they had to be pretty agile on top of the ladders to be able to collapse the houses without getting burned themselves. There was an ankle strap, used for the more daring of the stunts, and each ladder was held straight by a team of men at the bottom. Others would wave the standard and cheer once their performer was done with his trick. It was an impressive performance.

There was music, cheering, standard-waving, and acrobatics for awhile, and then the firemen cleared the field, taking their ladders with them. Firemen dressed only in a white sheet, skillfully wrapped around their waist, took the field, along with the golden standards and the firehoses. As a finale for the day, they proved their manliness by not only wearing such small garments on a cold, rainy January morning, but by then turning on the firehoses and either standing in or running around in the resulting spray. I'm not sure if it's an "honor" for the older members or some form of hazing for the new guys, but it is interesting to see! The firetrucks have their sirens and lights going through this as well, so it is a loud and impressive sight.

As always, check out more pictures on Flickr and more information about the ceremony here and here.

Winter Vacation Trip Part 5: Tokyo

After finishing our time at Ikenodaira, we took the bullet train to Nagano and then to Tokyo, where we'd be spending most of the rest of our vacation. We set up shop in the zero-cost school apartment once again. Hard to beat free housing in downtown Tokyo.

The first evening we walked from Aoyama down into Roppongi, the most foreign (ie American/European) of the neighborhoods of Tokyo. We walked around looking at restaurants, trying to find somewhere we wanted to eat at - passed a lot of places, did a lot of wandering, but ended up just wanting cheap burgers and going to Wendy's. Ana managed to find one of the very few Coldstone Creameries (upscale ice cream place - they mix things like nuts and candies into different flavors to order to make you custom cones and sundaes) in Japan without knowing where it was, but sadly they didn't have her flavors of ice cream or her fillings, so she couldn't make the monstrous concoction she normally orders in America. I felt relieved and ordered a mango sundae which was good but would have been better if I wasn't eating it outside at night in January where it was in fact cold.

Tokyo has buildings.

The next day we went shopping. Shopping for yarn. Which meant I followed her around to make sure she didn't get in trouble, and occasionally to offer judgment on whether such a color was appropriate for such an item. Apparently several of the places we visited are major knitting and crafting centers, famous amongst those who understand such things. We visited the yarn and fiber district (they have one) and also the fabric district (distinctly different). Unfortunately, it being the day before New Year's, most of the smaller places were closed, and Ana was not able to complete her pilgrimages to several of the famous stores she wished to visit. This did not deter her from purchasing more yarn than she could carry - about seven miles worth for various planned projects. I read a Robert Heinlein I hadn't read before cover to cover while we traveled from place to place and she shopped.

Gate to the yarn district

I don't know what they kept behind this door, but she didn't get to see it this time.

The picture doesn't really do the quantity of yarn justice.

One thing I should mention is that this trip revealed Ana's superpower. She has an uncanny ability to find craft stores (and fast food places) without directions, which is odd because her sense of direction the rest of the time is not strong. All the information she had on finding a few of these places was the subway or train-line stop, and one more than one occasion we walked unerringly, with several turns and no errors, directly to the front door of the crafting shop she was seeking. I was very surprised that we managed to find all the places we were looking for so easily, as finding anything in Tokyo can be painfully difficult due to the lack of street names and the rather obtuse address system.

You try finding something in this mess.

After her thirst for fiber had been slaked, due to not being able to carry any more, we went to the legendary Akihabara technology district to look around some more and so that I could try out some of the fancy office chairs I've been thinking about purchasing. I liked some of the chairs but not the prices - all about double the price in the US, a pretty standard increase for specialty goods here.

Continuing on with the shopping, we went out to Hiro-o where we ate dinner at the Mexican place we go to (sooo good to have good non-Japanese food) and then went shopping at the National Azabu supermarket there where otherwise unobtainable luxuries like molasses and sweet potato chips could be had.

We passed a Ferrari / Lamborghini dealership...and two Aston Martin ones.

The next day was New Year's, so we went out shopping early and then napped during the afternoon so as to be more alive for the evening. We went to Tokyo Tower for midnight, which apparently mostly foreigners do, probably because the Japanese spend New Year's at home in the countryside. Another American KTC teacher, Bolaji was staying at the apartment and joined up with us for this expedition. It was definitely a bit chaotic and raucous in the streets, with a lot of gaijin making us look bad, but at the base of the tower itself things were pretty calm, and not as crowded as you might think. The tower was lit up and there were moving lights on it, but strangely it didn't count down, just flashed the sign saying "2010" on when it was midnight, which made for a bit of an anticlimax.

Tokyo tower, shortly after midnight, January 1st 2010

After midnight, I was the only one who'd thought about what came next, so my plan carried the day and we headed to a Scottish bar I'd read about online. This lead to a really good demonstration that Ana's superpower for finding yarn shops and fast food was in fact aberrational; Bolaji and Ana said they knew which way to go and so I followed them around for at least ninety minutes before they conceded that we were not in fact at the destination, nor did we have compelling evidence of even making progress. So we took the subway and then used my carefully prepared turn-by-turn directions which worked much better than guess-and-check.

Thankfully, the bar turned out to be worth the trip, with outstanding fish-and-chips and other pub food, to accompany the mind-boggling selection of rare whiskey. They had some imported beers (which Bolaji started testing) and ciders (which Ana had and I can certify as wonderful) but clearly for me the draw was whiskey. I know that very few in the audience care, but just to put it out there this is definitely in the top 50 places in the world for whiskey, maybe higher, based on what I saw there. They had some of the best amongst the common single-malts on tap (on tap!) but their real focus was on extremely old, aged, rare, or unusual whiskeys, of which they offered over 300 kinds. I tested one inexpensive kind and two that were specials of the evening. Both of the specials were unobtainable bottles and the price was quite fair. They were both, I'm happy to report, good. I'm planning to go back next time we're in Tokyo, as the regular (as opposed to after-hours) menu looked good and they still have the other 297 kinds of whiskey to try. We stayed at that bar until about four before heading back to the apartment, where we slept until well past noon.

The bartender spoke whiskey in English. This is less than half the whiskey.

Not going to find that just anywhere. One of 281 bottles, laid down in the 70's.

In the middle of the day, we paused to celebrate New Year's again as the ball dropped in NYC - we had cheap champagne and some other junk food from the foreign supermarket so we made a bit of another party of it, though the internet available at the condo is inexplicably slow so our video feed from Times Square was a bit suspect.

This was our last full day in Tokyo, and we had one big thing left to do, which was go see Avatar in 3D IMAX. Ana managed to buy tickets online, but we had to pick the late show as the rest were sold out, which was fine. It turned out that the theater was in the absolute middle of nowhere, so it took a lot longer getting there than we thought it would, and we had to postpone dinner (I was starving) until after the three hour long movie. The movie itself turned out to be stunning, and the 3D effect was wholly worthwhile. For most movies I don't think it would contribute much, but in this case it really brought you into the scene and made it feel solid, though the effect does seem to cause a slight blurriness on the parts of the screen that aren't in focus. Mom - it would probably make you throw up, so if you go to see the movie do non-3D. Everyone else, I strongly recommend you give it a try - this movie will not be the same at home, and it is well worth going to see in theaters. After the movie we caught the last train back to civilization and ate at a restaurant that I would describe as kind of like a Friendly's, but with smaller portions, that was still open despite the late hour.

The next day we went back to Kanazawa, which was pretty unremarkable aside from seeing a whole bunch of snow from the trains going back.

The snow was at least four feet deep in the mountains.

Winter Vacation Trip Part 4: Ikenodaira Night Out

The faculty ski trip that we went to Ikenodaira with was only a two-night trip, but since we were going to Tokyo afterward rather than back to Kanazawa on the ski-trip bus we decided to stay a third night. Scott and Sarah opted to extend their stay as well, so when there wasn't a scheduled get-together on the third night because nobody else was there, it was with them that we went out into the world seeking adventure.

One of the very few attractions in the area besides the skiing is a large business with many offerings in one building that I'm not sure what to call, besides a tourist hangout. One of the ways they drum up customer knowledge is by deploying their mascot to the local ski areas. The mascot saw us taking pictures of him (her?) from a distance and charged / waddled towards us so that we could take some pictures. This is unrelated to the rest of the story except that this is the mascot for the place we visited.

So anyway, Scott and Sarah knew about and wished to visit this tourist place in the town, so after dinner we bundled up and walked down towards town to visit it. This was during one of the regular snowstorms, so it was quite scenic out there.

This is the cool place to be, I guess.

Inside this den of wonders was a convenience store, tourist schlock store, large inside/outside onsen, karaoke rooms, bar, billiard halls, and comics library, amongst possibly other things we didn't see or forgot about. However, all this pales in importance to one simple fact: they sold preserved giant hornets for snack food.

Hard to tell in the picture, but each one is about the size of a thumb - not small.

After a pause to mentally absorb the shock of giant hornet snack food, we split up and hit the onsen (by gender naturally, these are public onsen) , then joined up again and hit the karaoke. I'm not that big a fan of karaoke - the songs are not the same and usually not as good in the versions used, plus the focus is mostly on music that isn't particularly to my taste, but hanging out was still a good time. Afterward we went back to the lodge and watched some movies until exhaustion ended the evening.

Our small picture set for this adventure can be seen here.

Winter Vacation Trip Part 3: Hitting the Slopes

KIT's Ikenodaira Seminar House is across the street from the Ikenodaira ski slopes. These were the true destination for the first half of our trip. Now, I'd brought all my ski gear less skis from the US, because the skis themselves would have cost their full MSRP in shipping once both ways were accounted for, and that is well above their current value having been used for several years. So I rented just skis from the rental shop, which is also across the street from the seminar house, for a grand total of $60 for three days, which was a good deal in my book - didn't have to sign them in and out each day, just had to bring them back before the end of the third day. Lift tickets were purchased by the building manager for us and distributed inside the seminar house - we were alerted by another cacophonous announcement to come and get them. Unlike the American system, where lift tickets are little tags that can be easily hung from the large number of zippers on the average coat, the Japanese ones at this place were just little cards. The cool kids all had clear pockets on the arms of their jackets to store these little cards in so that they would be safe, dry, and easily visible, but my jacket has no such feature so for the first few runs I fished the card out of a pocket to show the attendant while trying to keep moving with both poles in one hand - less than convenient or effective. I stopped bothering with showing it and they never stopped me, so I felt a little bad but since I had paid to be there didn't worry about it too much. Lift tickets were $20 for a full day or $10 for noon to five - outrageously cheap, even though the ski area was not the biggest I've seen.

Full picture set and one video of us sledding on an inflatable banana available here.

We particularly liked the Canadian flag on the restaurant named for Tom Sawyer at the base of the mountain.

The snow was mostly natural, as far as I could tell, though groomed and packed flat. The temperature varied across the three days of skiing and the snow went from wet and sticky to cold and extremely slick. Some areas were a little icy but I've skied much, much worse - no sheet ice and no chunks loose on the trail, overall quite decent. One morning when I went up early I got to ski a few trails as clearly either the second or third person to do so that day, which was nifty.

I was struck by how much Niigata looks like home compared to Ishikawa.

The views were good - there were a few places on the mountain where quick transitions between only being able to see the trail and the trees around it to being able to see half of Niigata occurred and those were quite dramatic. One of my favorite parts of skiing.

The weather out there was highly variable. We had sun with high temperatures, cold cold with driving snow, and a goodly stretch of completely impenetrable fog, which changed location on the mountains over time, so that during one run an area would be completely clear, and on the next visibility was about 15 feet.

Not an exaggeration - note the snow texture at the bottom - this was taken on the slopes.

Ski patrol house in the fog

Ana had been considering signing up for ski lessons, but it turned out that they tended to do lessons starting at the top of the real mountain rather than on the (completely absent) bunny slopes, and that sounded a bit more adventurous than she wanted. We did do a run or two at the base on this contraption, but mostly she hung out with other non-skiers and non-snowboarders in the lodge and got a lot of knitting done.

We may have been using the toddlers' sled for this part. There's a video on the Flickr page too.

Winter Vacation Trip Part 2: Ikenodaira Meals

The resort area around the base of the Ikenodaira ski area is pretty small - the KIT facility is actually one of the biggest and most heavily frequented lodging houses operating there, so there aren't many restaurants around. Given that the KIT Seminar House also regularly brings in a few dozen students at a time, it needs to have the capacity to feed them while they're there. It therefore has a commercial-grade kitchen, a full-time kitchen staff, and a large dining hall, where we ate breakfast and dinner each day we were there are part of the deal. Only Japanese cuisine was available, so we had rather a lot of it, some of which was new to us. Also, they served set meals only, no choices or substitutions possible. Full pictures and analysis follow.

The gaijin got the big table all to themselves.

Our first meal there was this dinner. The salad in the bottom left is conventional, fish on the top left was a white fish with a sticky sauce that didn't taste like much, fried thing in the middle is a potato-based croquette (in broth, because they tend to put delicious crispy fried things in broth to make them soggy and sad) which was pretty good. The soba noodle soup had a curious texture and stickiness to it - Scott said it reminded him of the effects of arrowroot power. I believe the white in it was ground taro (a sticky tuber) so it was probably that causing the viscosity of the soup. The bottom right is salty pickled vegetables - an extremely common item I can eat without complain but also without much enjoyment. The top right is the entree, (tiny) braised beef bit (singular and small) and some veggies. Wasn't bad but the sauce had a bitterness or maybe an aftertaste - something about it seemed a little off. You can see a miso-cabbage soup on the top off the edge of the tray, unremarkable. I cleared my plates and had some white rice to boot, but Ana had problems because most of these dishes were served cold, which is a huge turn-off for her. That included the beef, so I helped by eating most of her leftovers. All the dinners included beer (Asahi Super Dry, pretty much the only beer ever served in Japan) and tea, but for water you had to go to the sink to get some.

First Dinner

The next morning brought us the first of several of the most-Japanese breakfasts we've ever eaten / half-eaten / looked at. At first we thought maybe everybody else knew something we didn't....

...because this is how many people came to breakfast on time. The large red container is white rice - there was one full container that size for each group of four people present for both breakfast and dinner.

But shortly thereafter everybody filed in. It should be noted that the first day they gathered all of us around and very calmly and firmly told us that dinner was at six and breakfast was at eight and we should be there ten minutes early each time. I think they may have confused us with their usual audience of students. Seriously, guys? You're telling faculty to show up ten minutes early, or else? I don't understand. Also, they announced meals over the intercom quite loudly (it would definitely wake anyone trying to sleep several times over) so it isn't like anyone who isn't there doesn't know about it. Moving back to the food...

First Breakfast

The first breakfast was hit or miss for me, but aside from the strawberry a near total miss for Ana. The bottom left is a salad of (I think) radishes, with a Japanese style salty/tart/sweet dressing. I rather enjoyed it. Clearly in the top left is a sliver of cold roast salmon, which was exactly as you would expect. In the middle is tofu with sesame dressing, which both of us passed on. Nothing against tofu but I don't need to see it at breakfast. Bottom right has more of the same pickled vegetables and some seaweed wrappers. I'm not sure what the wrappers were supposed to wrap, so I didn't eat them. On the top right, there is radish puree, omelet, a strawberry and some grapefruit. The fruits were fine but they put sugar in the eggs and that didn't work for me at all.

Second Dinner

The second dinner definitely hit a high point for me. The kimchee in the bottom left was tasty, the two small bowls of salty pickles were adequate, the stewed daikon in broth in the top left was also adequate, I skipped the fishcake in broth in the small white bowl (not a fan of compressed fish products), but the salad on the top right was fantastic. It had raw tako (octopus) and raw scallops in a tart, citrus-y dressing reminiscent of ceviche. The scallops may have been the best I've ever had. No grit, firm, subtly sweet, not covered up by the dressing - phenomenal. They weren't cooked in citrus either - totally 100% raw. After I ate mine I started helping less adventurous people deal with their overpopulation of scallops. Sadly, I had more takers than I could handle. Some people do not know what they're missing. There was another miso soup, this time I think with the crouton-like bready things that one often finds in miso soup here, not sure what they are or what they're called. And, of course, white rice.

Juan (son of a visiting RIT professor) gave me his scallops. Maybe all that Asahi clouded his judgement. (Kidding! Please don't hurt me.)

The second breakfast was pretty much a travesty. Witness the horror and sadness below. Cocktail wieners, cold, with ketchup, next to an undressed cabbage salad - this format of salad is common, but for breakfast? A raw egg, in sauce, intended to be eaten over rice. Pickles, the usual. Cold lotus root salad in the bottom left corner, which was acceptable for me but of course Ana wouldn't go near it because it was cold. The top left is cold roast mackerel,or something similar, in any case a heavier, oily fish. More inexplicable seaweed wrappers, tofu miso soup, and white rice. I ate the fish, daikon salad, pickles, and rice. I think Ana might only have eaten rice.

Second Breakfast...of HORROR

Fortunately, the third dinner was much better, else Ana would have been wasting away. Nice salad on the bottom left, wonderfully fatty and greasy mushroom egg rolls with hot mustard on the top left (need a break from all this healthy food), two dishes of pickles, one dish of tofu in broth (skipped), and the entree, which was the best part - salmon roasted in tin foil with a sweet white miso sauce with potatoes and vegetables. A darn good hot, filling, winter meal.

Third Dinner

The third breakfast was in line with what we'd come to expect, though it was better than the previous day's. Three pickled dishes, cold roast salmon, and the salad and eggs were the on the same plate. They didn't sugar the eggs this time, and the tomatoes were good so at least I got something to eat.

Third Breakfast

It should be noted that after dinner the first two nights, there were get-togethers in the lounge upstairs. The manager supplied beverages and snacks, games came from somewhere, and it was a fairly personable time. Since so many gaijin were around, it was a festival of full-speed English language with some Spanish and French mixed in between the most broadly multi-lingual. The free sparkling wines and shochu (hard alcohol from rice) didn't hurt either. One Japanese professor was meticulously crafting gin-and-tonics for the crowd, with far more dedication and focus than his extremely inexpensive gin merited, but the effort and the final results were appreciated.

I'm talking to our travel agent (Really!) while Sarah looks to be throwing snack food at Ana. Scott is more concerned with pouring shochu.

Uno and Scrabble were in evidence but mostly we talked.

So, our stay at Ikenodaira Seminar House did contribute to our knowledge of Japanese cuisine, in ways good and bad. But for the price and convenience, it couldn't be argued with, and it was so nice to be able to speak English at full speed for a couple of days. I'm glad we went. The next post will be about the skiing and activities there, and have lots of pretty pictures of the area.

Winter Vacation Trip Part 1: Ikenodaira Seminar House

We did a two-part trip inside Japan for this winter's end-of-year break. For the first half, we went to the school's seminar house in Niigata province. This facility is primarily used for team-building activities and the like - KIT classes rotate through and I think nearly all students end up spending a few days there at some point, but faculty and staff can stay there for reasonable rates, and since it is located literally across the street from a ski area, the school also has a couple of ski trips per year that stay there. It was our luck that a faculty-association trip was already going right when we were planning to, so we happily joined that and got massive discounts on the travel and food - only cost about $250 for both of us to get the bus ride there, our own room for three nights, breakfasts, dinners, and drinks. The skiing cost a lot less than skiing in New England too, probably because they don't have to make snow. It snowed every day we were there.

For the pictures associated with this post, go here.

As mentioned, the faculty association ski trip went north by bus, we had to walk with our luggage and gear the mile to school in the rain (started a few minutes after we started walking, should have known better than to leave umbrellas) and when we got there we discovered that more than half of the faculty members going on the trip were gaijin, which was a pleasant surprise and guaranteed much faster and more fluid dinner conversation. Niigata is several hours' drive north of Ishikawa and we drove we passed through places where precipitation was falling as rain into places where it had been and currently was falling as snow. We didn't notice it because it was gradual, but the trip also took us from about sea level to something like 3,000 feet up at the base of the mountain. This being a Japanes bus trip, they stopped the bus twice in the roughly three and a half hour trip so we could buy food and use the bathroom, despite the fact the bus had a bathroom on board. They were going to stop a third time before canceling it due to the fact that nobody wanted to.

The top is much higher than you can see, the big peak was almost always behind clouds.

The house itself proved to be much larger, more professional, and more institutional than we expected. Filled to normal operating capacity it would probably sleep 60 people, but maybe half that number was on the ski trip so everybody who wanted could have a room to themselves. I found it humorous that the building was so reminiscent of the rest of KIT despite this one being hundreds of miles away and in the mountains.

They even put the mascot on skis on the window.

This is a full view of the front of the building.

They have a separate entryway for people going out to ski or coming back from the slopes. The room has racks for skis and boots and the like. I neglected to take pictures of that room, but it was pretty cool to have an interior storage and staging area like that - keeps the gear safe and out of the weather without having to drag snow-covered items into your own room.

Outsides shoes storage - slippers only inside as usual, the ski entry is down the hall

Lobby of Ikenodaira Seminar House

The building also has a straight-up classroom

View from inside after a snowstorm

The rooms have their own toilets but everyone uses the onsen of their respective gender for bathing. There would be no time of day one could appropriately take a camera into one of the big onsen like the ones at the end-of-the-year bonenkai hotel but for a small facility like this, opportunities could be had to document it for those of you following along at home without issue, so I did.

Blue flag scares away women

Take off your clothes and put them and your towel in the bin. Big onsen tend to have "modesty towels" which provide enough coverage if held correctly that everyone can pretend not to be naked, but such were not employed here - guess we're all too friendly to need them, or something.

Sinks and primping area - generally for after everything else

Grab a stool from the stack and head over to the showers - not getting super clean before getting in is rude, though I've seen it done. If all you want is a shower, you're set.

Otherwise, the onsen itself is usually about two feet deep, with no seats. A major onsen complex might have several pools at different temperatures, both inside and outside of the building, but Ikenodaira has just the one per gender.