Written by Dave

Rest day – Matsue musings

Laundry, shopping for supplies, phone calls to Moms, a bit of checking out Matsue and now there is barely time to have a soak in the hotel spa. Life as an adventure traveler is so hard! There are a couple foods you are supposed to try in Matsue – the first being the Izumi buckwheat soba noodles, the second being the small freshwater clam miso soup. But it took almost no effort to sample these as both were offered at the hotel buffet breakfast so they were ticked off the list before 8AM. Both are tasty I might add and very different tasting to the traditional buckwheat and miso offerings we’ve had before. We may just sample them again tomorrow as brekkie opens at 6:30 and easily supports our desire to get on the road before traffic picks up in the city.

With a short list of big targets for the day, I decided today I might talk about a few other things that we’ve found odd/interesting/different here in Japan. Some of these were from past days, other from pretty much every day. The everyday ones don’t surprise us any longer but they did at first and are worth noting.

For starters, there are very few fire hydrants in Japan. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find one any city or town street corner. It’s not they don’t have fires or the need for fire suppression, but rather, they hide the fire water points under special manhole covers. When we first saw the covers, we thought they were another one of the custom covers we see from town to town but they started repeating and the penny dropped. We’ve seen 2 types of cover in large number, and a few more odd ones from time to time. The popular ones are shown below. I’ve been to Japan some 30 times, mostly for business and I’ve never noticed fire hydrants. That’s the difference between business travel when you are being driven from meeting to meeting and a cycle tour where you have time to slow down and see things.

Next I’ll talk about vending machines. We have seen drinks vending machines on many street corners and every shop. Some are even out in the middle of the country on the side of the road where it is not even clear where power is coming from. Japanese love their vending machines. And it’s not just drinks. We’ve seen vending machines for ice cream (sort of normal), fish, raw pork, noodles, brewed coffee, gyoza and of course beer and cigarettes. The latter two are in vastly reduced number compared to nearly 40 years ago when I made my first trip here. And the beer vending machines still cut-off sales at midnight, when the bars close (Nancy reports this from her college days here – it wasn’t me!).

One could write an entire post on the famous bum washing bidet-like Japanese toilet but this blog is still holding on to the “G” rating so I’ll just comment on the new style Japanese hotel bathroom. The new builds, at least at the hotel level where we stay, have moved 100% to all-in-one drop-in motor home like units. 100% plastic, get water everywhere and never worry. It’s disconcerting to have water flowing between the wall and the shower but it’s all part of the design. The biggest issue for us is that we are above average height in Japan and these units often have raised floors and lower ceilings, and an under strength exhaust fan. It can be a little claustrophobic when the little pod gets extremely hot and steamed up after a shower.

Many readers would have heard about the plastic food/menu samples in the shop front of a Japanese restaurant. They still have them but more and more, they are using posters. With Google translate and Nancy’s Japanese skills we rarely have to go out front and point at what we want – I won’t claim that we haven’t done it this trip however. I did a little reading today and discovered a simple fake beer mug can run mid-twenties USD, a bowl of soup, mid-fifties USD and a whole plate a sushi can push into the multiple hundreds of USD. You’re looking a pretty big investment in a restaurant if you fill an entire window with plastic renditions of the entire menu.

Recycling is another thing that is on steroids here. In Starbucks today (shame us, we needed a good coffee) we noted that they separate paper, plastic, burnables and cups. Plus they still serve in-house drinks and foods in washable dishes. And if anything, Starbucks is just keeping up with the minimum. The other day we rode past a town garbage collection point where bottles and bottle caps were separated, gas canisters were separated and all the different plastics were separated. We don’t know what happens on the back-end when all this stuff reaches the transfer station – so we’ll just hope it is all processed properly.

And finally, about our dinner last night. We made it to the yakitori restaurant and had a very nice meal. The entire menu is on an iPad and self-service. Of course we had to get the staff over to help us but once we got it sorted it was easy. Yakitori is basically sticks of food cooked in front of you over charcoal. You order specific items prepared on demand. You pick what you want, order, and a few minutes later the cooked pair of skewers shows up. Every order comes with two skewers and cost from $1.00 to $1.40 USD. We over ordered, ate too much and had a lot of fun in the process. It’s not always the case but the restaurant we visited had good exhaust fans so we didn’t come home smelling like BBQ’d chicken – bonus.

Ok, handing this off to my senior editor now and heading to the spa. One more day tomorrow riding up the coast, then a couple days riding back across the middle of Honshu. The forecast looks good and we are well rested.