Hokkaido JSEE Trip 1: of Conferences and Genghis Khan

The Japan Society for Engineering Education holds one of the bigger educational conferences in Japan, which we've attended in the past.  This year, we both had papers to present, and so got free trips to the conference location to present them.  The conference this year was in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, which was a bonus because we hadn't been there before.   If you'd rather skip the wordy bits and go right to the pictures they are as always on Flickr.

There is only one flight per day from Kanazawa to Sapporo, which is an early morning flight, so we got up early and pretty much slept through the various buses, flight, and train rides required to get from here to there.  Also traveling with us was Ana's paper collaborator, another gaijin, from the computer department of the school where they teach. After arriving (but before the hotels would let us check in) the three of us went looking for lunch. We managed to find a fun buffet serving pretty good pastas, pizzas, and etceteras.  Being fed, we checked into our hotel, napped a bit, then put on formal wear and went to the conference reception.  The few speeches were short, which was good, and there were platters of local Hokkaido crab claws and legs as well as scallop carpaccio to eat along with good local sake, which was even better.  We were still pretty full from lunch, so we concentrated on the good stuff.  We also met a number of engineering education folks, mostly from Japan.

The next morning we had to get down to more serious business.  We attended the international session of the conference and presented our respective papers without major problems arising.  We were not very impressed with most of the papers presented - the JSEE international session is not a prestigious place to present and they'll take most anything that looks sort of like a paper for it.  Our stuff had to be in the top English 5 papers for the day, for sure.  Well, this conference was really more about  practice and resume-building for us, anyway.

The international session of the conference ended in the late afternoon and thoughts turned to dinner.  Ana's collaborator had been to Hokkaido before and knew just the place, but reservations weren't available until 8:30 at night, so we napped until the appointed hour was near.

This is not where we ate dinner.  This is on the way to where we ate dinner, and based on the sign we had to take a closer look in case returning later was called for.  There have been some good American "diners" we've been to in Japan.

We determined that this is Not-An-American-Diner.  Unless you know of American diners serving omlet-rice?  Sigh.

This is where we actually ate dinner: the immense and venerable Sapporo Beer Garden, the famous home of Genghis Khan. But we arrived a bit early, and had to kill some time in the reception area / gift shop before we could dine.

Which was OK because in the gift shop we found such treasures as this frightening Beer Chocolate...

...and this skillet shaped like the island of Hokkaido.

The Sapporo Beer Garden (owned by Sapporo Beer) is possibly the biggest restaurant I have ever been to.  There are at least three large buildings housing many different halls - they have a single reception area and then the staff whisks you off to wherever in their empire the free table exists.

At this point in the narrative, the references to Genghis Khan should probably be explained.  First, the Japanese are prone to giving interesting non-Japanese names for things and then acting like those names are understood by anyone who speaks English when only the Japanese actually know what they mean.  For instance, buffet-style places are usually labeled "Viking", as in smorgasbord, instead of buffet.  Innumerable other words are mutilated instead of changed outright, like "convenience store" becoming "conbini" and "air conditioner" becoming "aircon".  Genghis Khan is the Japanese name for Mongolian barbeque, and Hokkaido has a lot of Mongolian barbeque, and it could pretty much be said that we went out for Genghis Khan for dinner and everybody would understand (but only if you pronounced it in the Japanese way, "jingisukan").

The location being the Sapporo Beer Garden, there were specialty beers from Sapporo, and the night being about all-you-can-eat sizzled lamb, there was plenty of that.  The idea is that they give you the huge skillet-on-a-grill and as much lamb and vegetable matter as you like, and after coating the skillet with lamb-lard you sizzle it all up and start eating.  When you run out of things to grill, they bring more.  The lamb had good lamb flavor and was tender and juicy and good with the sauce so we ran through quite a bit of it.  At the end we tried a slice of Hokkaido cantaloupe, which you see selling in stores for absurd amounts of money ($25-35 would be pretty common per melon) and determined that they are in fact really good, though perhaps not good enough to justify the price tag in our minds.

We mostly even waited for things to cook before eating them.  Mostly.

As part of our amazing streak of having regular blog entries, expect the rest of the Hokkaido trip posts to go up in regular three-day increments.  The international session of the conference took place on Friday, so we had the rest of the weekend to be tourists.  Here's a spoiler - we don't go to a place called Meh-Meh Land...and I swear to you that is the true, exact, and real name of an actual tourist attraction in Hokkaido.

Noto Bike Trip 2

We biked around the Noto peninsula in the spring of 2011 and had a pretty good time [Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5] but there was some debate over whether we had really finished the job when we took the bus back the final leg instead of biking door-to-door.  Another foreign teacher here / friend of ours decided he wanted to do the Noto 400 course (race that does pretty much what we did, but faster) and asked if we'd be willing to do it all again early in September, before classes started up again.  Ana would already be back at work and didn't exactly feel a burning need to settle matters between us and a landmass anyway, which is probably fair, but I took up the gauntlet.  This time, the target was a door-to-door bike ride and ideally to accomplish the whole thing in four days instead of five.  To that end, we spent a lot of time riding rather than taking pictures, but those we have can be seen on Flickr. 

Stopping to put on waterproof shells ~45 minutes after leaving home

 Remembering that the wind was a major factor the first time around the Noto, I resolved to create a more aerodynamic touring configuration for my bicycle.  My hiking bag is big enough to hold the tent, sleeping bag, and crash pad and comes with the bonus of already having a waterproof covering available.  I kludged a better support for it out of plywood, nails, and zip ties and fastened said abomination to the panniers' frame.  It was ugly when visible, but the bag pretty much covered it and in that configuration I thought it looked pretty good, plus the bulk of the bag was almost entirely behind me.  I didn't exactly wind tunnel test the effects, but I think it reduced drag substantially, and only tried to fall off the bicycle once, when I went over a big bump and two zip ties snapped (I had spares).  Bungee cords also played a prominent role. Overall, I was quite pleased with it despite (or perhaps partly because of) its Frankensteinian nature.  Everything for quick access I kept in the smaller bag on my back.

Anyway, after the maniacal cackling subsided, it was time to hit the road.  The weather report was generally pretty positive, with no more than a 30% chance of precipitation on any day of the trip.  Weather reports in Japan are really more of a prediction of what won't happen than what will, in my experience, and it started raining before we'd even left the city limits on the first day, but this was a prepared-for experience and as we kept going on day 1 it started and stopped raining several times. 

 

 We accomplished the previous Day 1's efforts in about 3.5 hours, arriving the "campsite" around 10:30AM.

Our plan to make the trip take four days instead of five consisted of basically doing two days' worth of riding on the first day, and getting close to or reaching Wajima.  Those reading the previous blog entries and doing some arithmetic will note that when Ana and I did it Wajima took us more than 90 miles of riding to get there.  This time, through gallantly not getting lost very often and taking a better route out of the city we made it to Wajima after about 80 miles at something like 7:30 at night, after twelve and a half hours on the road.  We ate at the same yakuniku place as before and I got recognized by the staff despite only having visited once, four months earlier (I guess they don't get many gaijin).  That was apparently enough to get a free round of pretty decent steak bits, which was nice.  We hit the same onsen afterward and camped in pretty much the same place as before, but on a closed-off area of pavement instead of on top of the pricker bushes.  Total mileage was 82.2 for the day and I suspect that will stand as my record for some time.

 We were more than a little hungry at this point and dinner tasted really, really satisfying.  I honestly didn't think we'd really make Wajima in one day - it is quite a ride.

The night was rain on and off for a while and then the tap got stuck "on" and it stayed raining for the next ~24 hours without much respite.  Day 2 was going to be damp.  We soldiered into it somewhat gingerly, feeling a little beat up from the day before.  We made more stops for breaks and didn't push too hard, which was OK because we didn't have to make nearly as many miles.

 We made a few tourist-type stops, but didn't spend nearly as much time seeing things and taking pictures as the previous trip in May.  Here are the famous stepped rice paddies we photographed being planted in May, now full of rice.

 We ate lunch in Otani, a very, very small town.  I'm not sure I've ever been happier to see a bowl of soba in front of me - after several hours of biking while being rained on hot lunch was divine.  

 The way through the mountains was pretty primeval in the mist, and the turbines hummed in the background.

After lunch and with no sign of the rain letting up we decided to take an interior road across the Noto from Otani to Suzu instead of rounding the point as Ana and I had done in the spring.  It cut about ten miles off the day's riding, a good idea, and showed me a part of the peninsula I'd not seen before.  It could also not be called less than exciting, as the road went pretty much vertically up for an hour or so, then descended rapidly and with curves.  Between the enormous downhills and the rain I was really flogging my brakes and had to adjust them two or three times as large percentages of my pads got worn away by the abrasive brake-dust slurry that formed on my wheels.  There were also some pretty amazing bridges across very deep valleys that we crossed on the way down, but I'm not sure I could have stopped for a picture if I'd tried, so there aren't any pictures from that part.

Ineffective brakes not having proved fatal, we arrived at a positively civilized 2:30 or so at the Nihonkai Club and proceeded to eat a lot more than they expected us to, while sampling their fine home-brewed beverages.  Having arrived and sated our hunger so early and extensively, we felt able to continue riding onward afterward.  It was still raining, and I got talked into sleeping in a hotel in a nice dry air-conditioned room with modern plumbing instead of pitching the tent in some weeds on the side of the road.  At about $70, the hotel was the single most costly part of the trip and was completely worth it.  They had a pretty nice outdoor onsen, and since we were literally 40% of the guests at the hotel (we counted breakfast trays - there were 5), there was not much competition for space. 

 The included breakfast was about as Japanese as they come.  Cold roast fish, cold tofu with ginger, cold chopped daikon salad, cold pickles, and a cold raw egg yolk (Ana's note - this was most likely onsen tamago, an egg cooked in the hot spring which is just warm enough to soft-cook the white of the egg while leaving the yolk untouched) in cold broth.  The miso soup and rice, at least, were warm.  To be fair, I ate everything on this plate and thought most of it was pretty good.

When we first woke up, the sun had been shining, but by the time we hit the road it was raining again, and rained on and off all day, with decreasing frequency.  The weather was actually kind of nuts on day 3, with multiple instances of getting rained on while the sun was also shining on us.  The sunscreen could not stand up to this and I picked up some mild burns.

 

The wind was once again not very kind while headed south along the coastlines, but either it was weaker than before or my streamlining efforts worked well, because it was not nearly as bad as it had been in the spring.  Perhaps a combination of both?  This portion of the trip is fairly scenic and the hills are rolling rather than sheer, so it was a pretty nice ride in any respect.  We took an extra coastal road that Ana and I had skipped, adding back in most of the mileage we had subtracted the day before, and seeing additional nice scenery.

 We made Nanao while it was still light out (picture from following morning) and got fish and chips from the Fish and Chips restaurant mentioned in the previous Noto blog series.  It had stopped raining in the late afternoon, so we had some time to air out the tent and sleeping bags, and this made for pleasant camping.

 Helmet on to protect the unwary from gnarly helmet hair

 The fourth and final day we biked the leg that Ana and I had previously skipped, and found that it was by far the easiest part of doing the Noto, with lots of really flat terrain and only gentle, rolling hills.  The weather was nice and we tore through the miles at high speed to arrive home shortly after lunchtime, after total overall travel of 217.7 miles.  Ana made me tacos for dinner, and  I'm pretty sure it can now be said that I've biked the Noto in full.  Good times.  Stay tuned for even more blog entries because we are on a ROLL and keep adding more things to the schedule.

Ninjadera

There is a temple in Kanazawa colloquially known as "ninjadera" or "ninja temple" which has absolutely nothing to do with ninjas, and never did.  However, it is still supposed to be worth a visit, and since it is all of a fifteen minute bus ride from our apartment, we went to check it out.

For all of their protestations of being not-ninja-related, the temple proved well camouflaged, hiding down a side street with no sign on the main road.  That's the back of it at the end of the alleyway.

The back door didn't look attended, so we went around to the front rather than ending up someplace we weren't supposed to be.

 From the main entrance we could see that it was open and there were people inside.

 The exterior is pretty standard for Japanese temples.

We passed this on the way in and Ana mentioned that on the ghost tour in Tokyo she took with her mother the guide explained that this type of sticker has one's name, and the goal is to get it as high on the shrine as possible - the higher it is, the better the gods can theoretically hear you.

All the really cool stuff was inside.  Unfortunately, photography is not permitted inside, so we couldn't document that stuff for you visually.  The temple can't be explored on your own, because it is both quite old and very complicated inside, so the only method is by one of the tours offered by temple staff.  The tours are in Japanese but they have guidebooks that they give foreigners with basically a word-by-word breakdown of what is being said, which means that we got a lot more information than usual about what we were seeing.

The temple was built after the Tokugawa Shogunate had assumed total power in Japan and begun making strict laws to make sure that nobody could challenge that power.  One set of laws with that intention involved, basically, building codes.  The Shogun wanted to limit the types of defensive structures that could be constructed by forces not under his control.  One thing you weren't supposed to do was build structures with more than three stories, exactly why I'm not sure.  There were probably other limits, but we didn't get a lot of information on Shogun-era building codes.  

Anyway, the local lords of Kanazawa, the Maedas, wanted to have some strongpoints outside of Kanazawa Castle to watch the landscape for evildoers and provide havens for soldiers and spies on the move.  Ninjadera is a temple, but was constructed to be an extremely defensible temple that doubled as a lookout post and military strongpoint, and they built a number of fairly fiendish defensive mechanisms into it that the tour told us about and sometimes demonstrated.

For instance, some of the stairs leading into the main temple from the outside have rice-paper risers.  From a secret chamber under the stairs, one could see the feet of the enemy approaching through the rice paper without being seen oneself, and do violence upon said feet with spears or other weapons if appropriate.  The rest of the stairs being solid, it was possible to retreat from this attack position without the enemy being able to pursue.

If they made it past the stairs, just inside the main doors to the temple is what is normally a very large in-floor offering box covered by a wooden grating.  Remove the wooden grating, and suddenly you have a deep pit trap in which could be covered by something thin to snare the unwary, or just left uncovered for people running inside on the attack to fall into.  There are several pit traps in key doorways and connecting hallways throughout the temple.

Past the pit traps the main temple area can be found.  Several of what appear to be walls are actually mesh doors to dark alcoves, where the guards inside can see out through the bamboo mesh, ready to leap out and do bad things to people.  

Past those guards, the structure of the temple itself starts to get really tricky.  The outside of the building appears to have three (perhaps slightly larger than normal) floors, but inside there are actually seven levels.  An interconnecting maze of full-height and half-height rooms and tunnels offers easy transit in any direction to someone who knows the temple well, while being a complete mess for the ignorant. Lots of one-way doors, secret tunnels with locking doors, hidden staircases in closets, and the like, along with an escape passage that is supposed to lead outside the temple grounds to the castle that is actually located inside the temple's well.  There are also hidden rooms and compartments if simply hiding seems a better choice than fighting or running, though one of the hidden rooms was intended for use by a lord or commanding officer who needed a good place to commit suicide.  That room's door can't be opened from the inside once closed.  There was at least one room that, standing in it, there was no obvious way out - all the doors connecting to that room were concealed in some way.  The whole thing was pretty cool and we understood everything that was being said on the tour from the book, which was a real treat. The Japanese website has some pictures of the various traps and hidden stairs here, but again it is in Japanese and the pictures are fairly small.

All in all, a pleasant little visit to a place intended to be unpleasant for uninvited guests.  I guess when you pay for the tour they don't feel the need to spear your feet through the front stairs.

Gold Leaf Museum and Souvenir Shopping

Here's the thing.  We didn't actually take any pictures of the gold-leaf process or goods in the actual building.  We were getting shown the process by this older gentleman in about 1/2 English and 1/2 Japanese and we just didn't think to get the camera out.  Sorry. I'll describe the gist of it: they hammer the heck out of the gold with machine hammers, which causes it to spread out.  Then they cut the spread out pieces into smaller squares and hammer them until they're once again inconveniently large.  This repeats for days.  The small chunks are put between leaves of paper that are bound into a book-like thing made for hitting, so that they can hammer hundreds of the ultra-thin squares of gold at once.  At the tail end of this process, the gold leaf is exceptionally thin - he mentioned one ten thousandth of a millimeter, which is about 0.000004 inches if I did the unit conversions correctly.  At this point the metal doesn't act like you expect, but folds and flows like cloth, which was really cool to see.  The place we were at also had a store with quite reasonable prices (compared to places further from the source) and we did a lot of souvenir shopping there.

We did take a picture of green tea being milled in a tea / tea-ceramics shop we passed.

We've intended from the beginning of our time here to come back with a certain quantity of cool Japanese stuff.  We've generally held off on purchases so that we'd get to know what was out there and what it cost before laying down real money on things that might later be eclipsed in excellence and undercut in price.  However, we're now approaching the end and decided that this month would be a good time to get into the hunt in earnest.  We've been out a few times looking for particularly nice items that also happen to be in our price range.  I saw a $25,000 plate in one store; it was freakin' gorgeous and I probably would have bought it were it say, only $500 or so and therefore merely very expensive instead of simply beyond any semblance of reason.  Another vase for a mere $12,000 caught my eye at another point, but I had to let it go. 

 

We discovered one of the major craft-stall areas at the top of a shopping complex temporarily displaced by a children's fun center, which stopped us from shopping there on this occasion.

Fortunately, there are a lot of things out there that aren't quite that expensive, and occasionally they're even nice, and worth what's being asked for them.  Over a few different instances we went to probably a few dozen different stores and only made purchases at maybe five or six of them.

 We grabbed dinner at a Vietnamese/Thai place near the station that we hadn't tried before.  Pretty good for the price - it was cheap and solid but not outstanding.

 They did have some pretty interesting plating and presentation going on, very showy.

 This is the current and mostly final haul of goods - I'm still looking for a vase of a particular style and Ana may buy more tea mugs if she encounters the right one(s) at the right price(s). There are some nice serving plates, some Japanese tea (matcha) mugs, a couple of interesting vases, and some additional pretties that we can display that are very Japanese.  There really aren't more pictures that are relevant to this post, so I'll sign off by saying that the next post will probably be our tour of the local "ninja" temple, which never had anything to do with ninjas but is supposed to be chock-full of interesting hidden defenses and cunning escape routes.

Shirakawa-go

Shirakawa-go is an old-style Japanese village in the mountains to the east of Kanazawa.  Various international organizations that monitor and certify such things (namely UNESCO) say that it is really super, and a lot of tourists from both inside and outside Japan visit.  This August gave us plenty of time to do a lot of things we'd been meaning to, and Shirakawa-go was on the list.  An easy day-trip from home via bus from the station, we booked tickets to arrive mid-morning and depart mid-afternoon, on the feeling that no matter how historical, buildings are rarely so engaging that four or five hours of looking at them is less than satisfactory.

 Shirakawa-go is definitely amidst mountains.  While the primary attraction is a number of 200-year-old thatched roof houses of a construction style unique to the area, the the landscape and informal gardens are also quite pretty.

 Being engineers, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how the thatch is attached in addition to appreciating the buildings' aesthetic virtue.

 The rice up there is not as ripe as ours down on the coastal plain but rice in rice paddies was much in evidence.

 In one section of town, some more modern houses are present.  Most of the houses are actually lived in, except for the museum area off to one side.  Still looks mighty nice though.  The many producing gardens next to houses is extremely common in suburban and rural Japan, though in Shirakawa-go they seem to feature more flowers than usual.

 Some of the aquaculture areas (at least I think they're for aquaculture - some ponds had what appeared to be troutish fish rather than the decorative carp) had some very nice water lilies.

 Scenic overlook over the the town.  Ana in full yarn-trooper mode.

 The guy who took this picture knew my camera better than I do, and I watched as he switched it into one of the manual modes and started pressing buttons. 

 This is a rice planting machine, in one of the larger sizes that I've seen.  Rice seedlings in trays would be loaded onto it and it shoots them into the ground in rows.  This has to be waaaay faster than doing it by hand, which I've seen being done with some regularity around here.

 We paid to enter the museum area of the town, where the houses tended to be older and kept closer to original condition.  They are also quite large, some of them could be entered.

 I got a good look at the inside structure of the roof.  Apparently, snow is a serious problem up there - it looks like this thing could get hit by a meteor and walk it off.

 The upper floors of these large houses were originally used for growing and harvesting silkworms, increasing household income and presumably giving them things to do during the winter.

 Ana was quite pleased not to fall in.  That bridge is on the "Usual Route" of the tour that most people would be expected to follow.

 Definitely pretty enough to justify heading out there for an afternoon, at least if you live in Kanazawa to begin with.

This insect landed on Ana as were leaving, and was perhaps not as fearsome as she initially feared.

The four hours or so that we budgeted for seeing the town proved to be about perfect for us - we skipped some things that we weren't that interested in, and saw or did pretty much everything we wanted to there.  We had enough time at the end to grab a snack and eat it before the bus back to Kanazawa was ready to go.  See the rest of the pictures on Flickr.  It was early enough when we got back that we had time for some additional souvenir shopping in Kanazawa. What did we buy? Stay tuned to find out!

Kagaonsen Trip 3

For the third and final day of the Kagaonsen trip, we once again rode the CanBus to tourist destinations.  We checked out of the hotel and stashed our bags in a locker in the train station, then jumped on the bus.  Our first stop was Yamanaka Onsen, which means "mountain inside hot spring" literally translated.  We weren't headed for the hot springs part of it so much, but rather the gorge carved by the river next to the town and the interesting bridges across it.

 We went first to this very artsy winding purple bridge, which has an unusual curved design.  We crossed it from the town side to the nature side, where they have a green walk that goes the length of the town from bridge to bridge, along the gorge.

 Some places along the walk have picnic spots and stands for buying snacks - a nice place, though we did not stop.

 This is the gorge under the bridge on the other end of the nature walk - there are fancy hot springs hotels lining the other side of the gorge, so all the rooms facing the gorge get a view of the rocks and river.  The bridge was supposed to be hundreds of years old, but at the least it had been reinforced much more recently than that as large modern steel fittings could be clearly seen on the underside.

 After walking along the gorge, we walked back through the center of town.  It looked like they were setting up for a festival, and unfortunately a lot of shops that looked interesting were not open, possibly in preparation for being open non-stop during said festival.  Probably half the shops were closed, but we still saw some nice things as we meandered through.

 After catching the bus back to the terminal to switch to a different bus line, we had half an hour or so before the next bus and got greasy McDonald's fries for lunch and milkshakes to combat the heat.  After getting on the other CanBus for the different route, we headed for a place whose advertisements had long confused us, to ascertain the true nature of the place.  The brochure talks a lot about rabbits (website).  Apparently, they are for petting.

 It's free to get in, and you can get gloves from bins.  Posing with gloves optional.

 After you put on the gloves you can pet the rabbits, which are mostly pretty OK with this.  Additional OK-ness can be purchased in the form of rabbit treats, which get their attention better than just offering to pet them.

 The rabbits ranged in size from quite small to quite large, and despite the large number of rabbits, the place seemed to be kept quite clean.  There were also many places for overexcited rabbits to hide from attention, which got used when some younger Japanese children would for instance run screaming after a particular rabbit.

The rabbit place also had a lot of creepy statues of various animals and demons stuck all over the buildings and grounds.  There are more examples in the Flickr set.

The free rabbit petting is paid for by sales from a very large selection of rabbit-themed merchandise, and other non-rabbit-themed selections.

Our final stop before getting back on the train to Kanazawa was Kaga Fruits Land, which offers you-pick fruits of various sorts and products derived from the fruits that presumably nobody picked, along with a yakuniku (small grilled pieces of meat) restaurant and probably a bunch of other ways to make money that we remain ignorant of.  We didn't particularly want to do the you-pick since the prices weren't so great and it was almost closing time for them, but we did want to see what a "Fruits Land" was and what interesting things they had for sale.  They had a lot of juices and jams and jellies and the like, along with fairly expensive fresh fruits, and three house wines, which we had to purchase half-bottles of and evaluate for science.  We determined that their red is about a 2 out of 10, qualifying it as "plonk", while their white is probably a solid 4 out of 10, making it "drink-ably inoffensive, possibly worth paying something for".  The rose fell between them as probably 3 out of 10 and "not awful, but hardly good".  We also bought an unfermented grape juice which turned out to have a bit of a funky flavor to it, so we used it as a mixer with Sprite and rum, which worked reasonably well.

Also shown in the picture is the tea mug that Ana bought at the "Crafts Village" and the free seeds from the "Fruits Land".

All told, our little three day trip to Kagaonsen was a pretty simple, cheap, and easy good time, and we saw a lot of the strange little tourist attractions in the Kanazawa area that we had been aware of but not visited yet. Definitely check out Flickr for more photos of the statues!