3D Billboards and a Taiko Show

 Despite the last night last night, I was up early to run before the rain started. It was my first chance to see Sensouji in years, so I walked over to the temple to stretch before running.

This morning, it was my turn to drag Sumi out on a quest that was twofold. First, I'd been seeing a lot about the 3D billboards that they have in Shinjuku and Shibuya, and wanted to see them. Also, today is the release date for Final Fantasy 16, and there are ads on those billboards and elsewhere around the city that are pretty spectacular and will only run for a few days. So, we hopped a train to Shinjuku to see a giant 3D cat.

The wolf would stop by occasionally to shill for his new game

It was pretty spectacular, really. I'll link to some videos of the billboards at the end of the post. There was also a trailer for FF16 that used the 3D capabilities of the billboard, but we didn't get a chance to see it. After seeing the cat, we headed down to Shibuya where there are two more of these billboards, one with a panda, and one with Hachiko, the famous dog.

The panda is on a smaller billboard a short ways from the station, and does some silly stuff with a fairly clueless expression on his face. Pretty accurate, to be honest. The dog, on the other had, only comes out at the top of every hour. The panda and cat were pretty much constant, so we weren't aware of this, so we spent quite a while waiting for him to show up. In the end, I was quite impressed with this tech. It's probably expensive, but I'd like to see it used more back in the states.

This afternoon we had tickets to see the world-renowned taiko group, Kodo, play in Asakusa with a few of our fellow taiko players from back home who are visiting relatives here. We met Manami and her daughter Maika and her son Taishi at the Asakusa Public Hall for Kodo's "Calling" tour, a collection of mostly new material we'd never heard before. No pictures or video, obviously, but they are always an impressive group to watch. 

The Hibiki Crew

Afterwards, we headed down to Kappabashi, a road famous for shops that sell a huge variety of cooking goods, from pots and pans to specialty knives to plastic food for restaurant displays. Manami-san is a very good cook, it is very much a hobby of hers, so this was like Sumi going to Hobby Off and browsing through all the little character goods they have there. Needless to say, an hour later she had a bag full of new cooking toys and we were off to find some food. We opted for dinner at a local restaurant, Mizuguchi. Because there were 5 of us, we were seated upstairs in the traditional family dining section. 

The menu was varied, and geared towards fish, as is usually the case. The real Japanese people had tune sashimi, dabs, and mackerel while the foreign tourists had vegetable itami (basically stir fried veggies and rice) and chicken fried rice. A few things about our meal (which was good, by the way). First, Sumi ordered the vegetable itami. I have in the past also ordered vegetable itami. And it always seems to come with some random, unadvertised, non-vegetable. In this case, it was pork. My chicken fried rice was advertised as having....well, look for yourselves:

Yes, that reads "Tomato Ketchup Flavor"

And that 100% is exactly what it was. Chicken, rice, and ketchup. It tasted better than it sounds. We also shared some potato croquette, a popular appetizer in Japan. It's always a bit weird seeing people you know in one context in another. It's like when a student sees me outside of the classroom or a patient sees Sumi in the grocery store. Seeing people that live just a few miles from us halfway around the world is a weird feeling. Modern travel really has made this a small world.

After saying our goodbyes, it was back to the hotel through the rain that had finally started falling, with a brief 7-11 stop for breakfast food for tomorrow and ice cream bars for dessert. Tomorrow we're heading up to Saitama to go Taiko shopping!

Tokyo Beerzilla?

Sumi finally bought her own personal fan

Long Train back to Tokyo and Ramen in Shin-Yokohama

 After a full day of bunnies and an onsen resort, we were up early to start a long trip back to the Tokyo area. I got a chance to squeeze in a short run and confirmed the island is almost exactly 2 miles in diameter. I also got to see the island lighthouse up close.

We caught the first ferry back to the mainland and walked the 0.5 miles to the train station in Tadanoumi. It's such a small town (and station), that no one was even there to take our tickets. After a 45 minute wait, the train to Mihara was a small, 3-car train that clattered slowly along the coast until we reached Mihara, where, after an hour layover, we took our first, short shinkansen ride to Okayama where we would pick up the shinkansen to Tokyo. As luck would have it, we ended up on the Hello Kitty shinkansen again! It made me wonder why we went through all the trouble to get on it the other day when we were just going to stumble onto it today, but oh well.

The second shinkansen was a much longer trip, about 3.5 hours to reach Tokyo station. No Hello Kitty this time, just a boring old 240 mph train. After finally arriving in Tokyo we had one last train ride, this time a Tokyo Metro subway (the Ginza line, to be exact) to Asakusa and finally a 10 minute walk to return at last to Toukaisou! It really did feel like coming home again. The same picture on the wall of the same room we were in several times before. The same recession and pandemic-proof love hotel across the street. It felt nice to be in familiar surroundings.

So after about 8 hours of traveling and finally arriving at home base for the remainder of the trip, what's the first thing we do? Get back on a train for Shin-Yokohama to check out the fabled Ramen Museum. Not to be confused with the Cup Noodle Museum in Osaka. The museum is stick in the middle of a fairly upscale part of Shin-Yokohama just off the train station hidden amongst some large office buildings. 

The entire first floor of the museum is dedicated to a fairly deep dive into the history of ramen in Japan. The Cliff's Notes version is that it was morphed into what we know as ramen over hundreds of years of Chinese chefs making noodle dishes catering to Japanese clientele. The modern explosion of specialty ramen internationally is a very recent phenomena. Most of us just think of the dried Maruchan ramen packets that college students lived on because they were 10 cents a package. But many areas of Japan have their own special ramen recipe and a real ramen restaurant meal is nothing like the instant noodles we see in America. 

A mechanical sign that dips the noodles in the bowl

Each bowl is a different recipe from that region

A typical ramen cart of the pre-WWII era

The lower level of the museum houses a recreation of a 1950's shopping area, complete with candy shop and numerous ramen shops, each with a different type of ramen. We chose a tonkotsu ramen from Kumamoto, which is a lighter pork and chicken broth with thin noodles seasoned with garlic and black pepper. For a tourist spot, it was quite good, though I still prefer Ichiran's spicy tonkotsu with fresh garlic.

Taking the train back home, we got in at about 9. I ended up having to get some laundry done, so it was a trip to the local coin laundry and returning close to midnight. It's going to make the run tomorrow morning a bit painful, but it's all been worth it so far!

I've posted before how little things like international copyright matter to small businesses in Japan :-) The coffee shop in the resort on Okunoshima had a logo that was, lets say heavily inspired by a certain coffee chain from Seattle, though with a bunny rather than a mermaid.

Bunny Kingdom (Okunoshima)

 A number of years ago, while we were on one of our bike trips that passed through Hiroshima prefecture, we were stopped in a very small town. We were at the local train station, because that's where vending machines and shade are usually found. It was fairly early in the morning, and nothing was open, so it was just us sitting down and eating. In small towns, the station also doubles as the local "tourist info" office and in this case we were idly looking at postings for the area and we saw an advertisement for "Usagijima" (Bunny Island). We had already passed the town that had a ferry going to the island, and there was a good amount of calculating going on trying to decide if we had the time and energy to go there.

In the end we did not, but we stored it in long term memory, hoping to be able to visit someday. As we were doing our last-minute planning for this trip, we decided that Okunoshima would be our last stop before heading back to Tokyo to end our trip. As Sumi dug in more, it looked like we could stay on the island and that is how we found ourselves on a sub-tropic island in the Inland Seto Sea filled with over 1000 rabbits.

The only place to get ferry tickets. And bunny food.

After a shinkansen ride to Mihara, then a small, 3-car conductor-less train to Tadanoumi, we walked over the ferry office. It's the only place to get tickets to the island. It also is where you need to purchase rabbit food to feed to all the bunnies on the island. We found this out after we got to the island. Never mind the numerous signs stating exactly that all over the station and online. In both Japanese and English. Reading is for chumps.

So we arrived at the island and were driven about 400 meters from the dock to the resort. A bus full of retired Japanese people and us. I didn't realize how tropical the island was until we pulled up to the hotel and were greeted with palm trees and an ocean. And bunnies.

Bunnies on the bus...

Palm Trees...

And bunnies

The room is very spacious (meant for 5)

And the view from our sunroom is all right...

So, we had a very brief discussion of did we really NEED to feed the rabbits, and I was told quite firmly that yes, we did indeed need to feed the rabbits. Thus, we had a two hour detour back to the mainland to buy some rabbit food. That said, the weather was sublime and it was quite pleasant just sitting outside waiting for the ferry to arrive. And we came back with two bags of bunny treats.

So, back to the island. Okunoshima was used as a secret factory before and during WWII to manufacture weaponized poison gas. At the time, Japan was a signatory of the Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of chemical weapons. The island was removed from all maps and its location as a small dot among many larger islands in the Seto Sea made it easy to hide in plain sight. The civilian workers were not told what they were making, and the primitive safety equipment did not shield them effectively from the gas. At the end of the war, the occupying Allied forces had the stockpile burned.

It took a while for the survivors and the relatives of workers to get recognition for the terrible conditions they were forced to work in by the military, and finally in 1988, the Poison Gas Museum opened, giving an unflinching account of the work done on the island. There are still ruins of the forts that were secretly built into the island here, looking a lot like a level from Uncharted or Tomb Raider.

The old power plant

Poison Gas Storehouse

Underground barracks

So what does all of this have to do with cute bunnies? Well, accounts vary, but from what I've found online rabbits were used as test subjects during the manufacturing of the gas. When the factories were shut down, those rabbits were euthanized. Later, in the 1970's, a school group released some rabbits on the island as a sort of memorial. It turns out there are no predators on the tiny island (The total perimeter of the island is about 2 miles) and bunnies, being bunnies, multiplied like...um...bunnies. This caused a problem, because the vegetation was a bit sparse to begin with, and they rabbits ate it all. 

Being Japan, they turned this into a tourist opportunity. The rabbits on the island rely on tourists feeding them to survive. As this has gone on for many bunny generations, the rabbits of Okunoshima have no fear of humans and will come up to you if you look like you are going to feed them. Unlike a lot of wild animals that get used to humans feeding them, these rabbits are surprisingly chill. Since they've never really had to compete for food, and they are most definitely well fed, the rabbits are not at all aggressive and are quick to leave you alone if you don't feed them. There are also strict rules on what you should and should not do with the rabbits, as they are still wild creatures and definitely not pets.

So the rest of our day consisted of walking around the island with bags of bunny treats looking at the ruins and the shoreline, finding some hungry bunnies (note: they are always hungry) and feeding them.

The trail around the island was pretty much like this

And this was the view from the northwest corner of the island

Pardon me ma'am, would you happen to have some rabbit food?

A litter of young bunnies

"Bunny On the Beach At Sunset"

Back at the hotel, we hit the onsen (no "normal" showers or baths at the resort) and caught the early dinner with all the old people. It was a baikingu meal (all-you-can-eat buffet) which is common for these types of resorts. I was expecting about 50 different fish dishes, some rice and a few desserts. That was almost exactly what it was, but they also had a special "Live Food" section (a chef preparing something while you are eating) that had beef kebabs and tempura. They were delicious, and we ended up quite satiated in the end.

Thus ends the traveling portion of the trip. Tomorrow we'll spend most of the day taking trains and waiting for trains to get us back to Tokyo, which will be home base for the remainder of the trip.

Before I sign off, I want to register my respect for the graphic artist who did this. There was a wall on the side of the ferry ticket office that welcomes everyone to the port. It has a lot of cute bunnies. Hidden in the very innocent wall full of bunnies is what you see below. There is only one of them in the whole wall of about 200 or so different pictures. It is not centered or highlighted. I happened to see it because it was at my eye level, which is taller than most Japanese citizens. The artists managed to sneak it past his superiors, get it approved, made, and installed on a government building. Well done, sir or madam.

Miyajima

 I started the morning with a really nice run through Hiroshima. There are a lot of parks and underpasses that make the run easier to do, and a lot of things to see along the way. From Hiroshima Station, I ran across the river and down to Hiroshima Castle, past the Dome, and around the Peace Park. As I've said earlier, when you are at a tourist site at 5:30am, there are no tourists, so it was really nice to get good, unobstructed views of some of these.

After the run, Sumi and I hopped a train to Miyajimaguchi Station where we took the ferry over to Miyajima, one of our favorite places to visit in all of Japan. This is our 4th or 5th time here to visit the "Floating" O-torii (big gate) and climb Mt Seto, the tallest peak on Miyajima. The various trails that lead up the mountain are of medium difficulty, so it's a good workout, and beautiful forest along the way. At the top, you can get a great view of the island chains in the Inland Seto Sea (Setosaikai).

High tide was at its peak when we came in

In about 5 hours, people will be walking up to the gate at low tide

There are several shrines and temples on the island

Our climb up was quite a workout. Along the way we saw various small impromptu shrines in the rocks, a small flowing stream that runs down most of the mountainside, and some really nice views on a clear sunny day.

On our way up, we heard monks chanting from one of the temples in the mountains, which was pretty cool. Then, a few decided they needed to practice their wind instruments. We think they were something like this

In any case, after hearing them, which anyone hiking on that side of the mountain most certainly could, we understood why they were practicing. It was....well, take a listen for yourself:

It took about 4.5 hours to make the trip up the mountain and back down, at which point we were a hot mess. A stop for some ice cream and shade, then back to the ferry for the trip back to the hotel. We're trying out the hotel's all-in-one washer and dryer. Basically, you put your laundry in and hit go. It adds detergent, washes, then dries your clothes all in the same machine. 

It certainly LOOKS high tech

Verdict: It washes just fine and... tries to dry. Not terrible, but anything cotton is still damp. Ah, well. 

We were boring after a long day and had curry again. At Coco curry. But we did see the CurryMobile!

All set for Commissioner Gordon's catering emergencies

Tomorrow we're going to Bunny Island! We've been reading up on our bunny etiquette and are ready to socialize with the denizens of Okunoshima! 

And a few signs for you:

The Mamushi blends into rocks AND is venomous. Sweet.

 

Miyajima SEEMED like a good choice at the time...

Hiroshima loves their Carp

25:30?