A pause on Japan

My intention was to write a seamless series of blogs about the Big Blog Adventure to Japan. This was scuppered by the interruption of a walking weekend in the Cairngorms which has forced Mr Blog into therapy.

Mate-Doug-Blog has been organising weekend walking breaks in May for over twenty years for his friends. On one of the early trips to "The middle of absolutely nowhere" (somewhere left of Loch Ness) Mr Blog was introduced to taking baths in a midge-infested loch boasting a maximum temperature of 5 C. He was also re-introduced to outside toilets.

Much has changed over the years. This May, Mr Blog realised that Mate-Doug-Blog has gone soft. He booked a place to stay with inside toilets, hot showers, running clean water...and no midges! 

The blame for this backsliding seems to lie with his new found, younger friends. These millenial types like all that the modern world has to offer, sanitation, comfort and vegetarianism. 

Mr Blog can deal with all of this except being forced to go veggie for three days. 

Evening 1 dinner: Vegetarian Lasagne. Large helpings of uncooked red onion and slimy mushroom served in a sauce that looked and tasted like grey milk.

Evening 2 dinner: Tofu Chilli, served without the chilli in case it upset anyone. A bottle of hot chilli sauce was provided for any weirdo who actually wanted to taste chilli.

Evening 3 dinner: Pasta with all the trimmings except flavour

Never in his long life, has Mr Blog ever gone three days without meat. 

But there was worse!!

One of the guests brought home-made rhubarb muffins, made with home-grown rhubarb on the guest's allotment. You could taste the fertiliser :-(

The therapist said writing this all down would help so hopefully Mr Blog can return to the subject of Japan before too long!

Ep 10 Blog Adventure - Bullet trains

Having seen all that Tokyo could offer in three days the Blogs headed for the station for a train ride to Shizuoka.

On the way to Tokyo Station for the next leg of the big adventure Mr Blog reflected that this city was city of 37 million people was missing a few things, namely,

1. Car horns - no one uses them. They sit patiently in traffic rather than shouting and getting stressed with jams they can't unblock
2. Graffiti
3. Litter
4. Aggression/impatience
5. Late trains

When it was first launched the Bullet Train didn't have the aerodynamic design to the front of the lead of the lead carriage. As a result the train would barrel through tunnels at high speed causing a rush of air out of the tunnel, that made a booming sound which scared the wildlife. A nation which prefers to not use car horns is filled with people who worry about birds and small animals being deafened.

One of those people was an engineer who had worked on the project to design the train. He was also a bird-watcher. He'd noticed how Kingfishers make almost no splash as they dive into water so he set about mimicing the design for the front of the train. No more sonic booms... happy birds.

Charming!

Buller Train

Kingfisher

Ep 9 Blog Adventure Pics of the Meiji Shrine

 Meiji Shrine

The gate to the Meiji Shrine (above)

Sadly they are all empty (Sake and wine casks)

More of the Shrine 

Ep 8 Sightseeing in Tokyo

Eric-the-guide-Blog ushered our group on to a coach with 30 seats for our whistle-stop tour of Tokyo. Nothing strange there...except that there were only four us. (It turned out 10 other folks changed their mind at the last minute and decided not to join us)

Mr and Mrs Blog began a game of "not sitting in the same seat twice every time we got on the coach" that day.

Here is what we learned...

• Emperor Meiji died in 1912 having lived in Tokyo
• They took his body to rest in Kyoto the old capital of Japan (450 km away)
• It was decided that 450 km was a long way away, too far to visit if you lived in Tokyo
• 170 acres of Tokyo were planted with trees to create a shrine to Emperor Meiji to save on the travelling
• With invasive species added to the mix there are over 100,000 different plants in the shrine
• Emperor Meiji would have got on with Mr Blog because he really enjoyed Sake and fine French wine. To remind visitors of this, there are hundreds of sake casks and wine barrels at the shrine
• Shinto shrines have a big wooden gate at the entrance (12m by 9m in this case) which you musn't walk through*
• Big wooden gates attract lightning
• The Japanese know a thing or two about lightning
• Next to the gate was a lightning conductor disguised as a piece of bamboo**
• The Japanese like the Meiji shrine***

Photos will follow :-)

*The gate is for the gods to walk through, not mere mortals

**The Japanese take great care to make sure there are no jarring sights or sounds in what they build (Even nail heads in a wooden house will be covered with a decorative piece of iron)

***The shrine attracts 10 million visitors a year. 3 million of them visit between 1st and 3rd January queuing for up to three hours to get in)

Blog Adventure Ep 7

Japan has long had a reputation for technological innovation. Bullet trains, robots and Atari Space-Invader machines for pubs.  

Very early on on the blog adventure it became clear the PR machine of Japanese tech has failed to adequately promote its best invention yet. 

The "Beer-pouring-machine"!

Quicker, better, more fun and easier to talk to than a barman.

(Video make take a while to load)

Blog Adventure Ep 6

With a population of 130 million people the Japanese government must have its hands full even on a good day. Food, defence, economic issues, international trade, law and order...

It was a surprise to find out that one of the pressing problems facing Prime Minister Ishiba and his government is that of surnames. Japan doesn't have enough of them! 

Guardian readers will already know what Mr and Mrs Blog found out on their recent adventure. By 2531 everyone in Japan will have the same surname, Sato. It seems that this is a genuine problem, (although more than a few Japanese thought it was an April Fools prank). 

Concerns have been raised that, without radical change, people will have to be known by their first names and/or a number. There are apparently a handful of dominant surnames in Japan including Tanaka (which means someone who lives by a field), Suzuki (Bell, tree) and Watanabe (Boundary) and Mr Blog's favourite Sato, (Village, home, wisteria or help)

With this dominance set to increase until the Sato's take over the country, the government is considering allowing women to retain their maiden names on passports and driving licences. 

Blog Adventure Ep 5

There were no diet programmes on the flight to Japan so 2-stone-heavier Mr Blog led Mrs Blog slowly through Narita airport.

Having read up a bit we were looking forward to new and strange foods, cultural differences, ancient traditions, a new alphabet and much, much more.

Food in Japan is a bit different to the food in Scotland. 

Mr Blog has always been a fussy eater. The late Nana-Blog found this out when she poisoned a perfectly good apple pie by putting blackberries in it. A battle of wills ensued with Nana-Blog insisting that (the then five year old) Master-Blog would eat the uneaten slice of pie for his breakfast or his lunch or his next dinner. She lost. 

The first Blog meal in Japan was in a restaurant on the 44th floor of an office block looking over the skyline. Beers and wines were brought and all looked good for our "Hokkaido style meal". The first plate arrived and our guide told us we were looking at raw shredded octopus, raw scallop, raw salmon and raw tuna. Mr Blog wondered if he would be threatened by a sumo-sized chef if he refused to eat it. Forced to starve or give in. With my extra two stone I figured I could hold out a couple of weeks.

Be it the charm of the people, the volume of the beer or the thought of the cost of the holiday... Mr Blog picked up his chopsticks. 

It seems that if you dab a tiny amount of wasabi on raw fish then dip it in soy sauce it does something...quite amazing.

Mr Blog has joined the Japanese Food Culture Association as their UK representative.

(Nana-Blog never ate raw fish)