“…without telling me you just got back from Japan.”

(four suitcases, each, plus an expanded carry-on bag and a conspicuously-large “personal item” disguised with a not-so-token Duty-Free purchase)

Unrelated, but important

Hey, Amazon! Why didn’t you tell me that a new Tim Powers novel came out? In December!

Puchi-puchi desu!

We bought a lot of breakables (not just of the ceramic or liquor-ish varieties), and we wanted to be thorough in our wrapping. We’d brought a lot of packing material, but it wasn’t nearly enough, and we went to Don Quixote, because they had the big rolls of bubble wrap last trip. This is the most common advice on travel forums for finding the stuff in reasonable quantities.

The tiny little flaw in this recommendation is that every Donki store is different, and the one near Teramachi in Kyoto does not stock any packing or shipping supplies. Not even tape.

After fighting with Google for a while, I fished up a winner: Package Plaza Sanko. It’s a commercial packing-supply company that’s open to the public, and they have everything you need, even rolls tall enough to hide the body. Contrary to some reviews, we found the employees quite friendly and helpful.

Why was it difficult to find? Try googling for “package plaza kyoto”, and the GenAI tells you about “Package Plaza Orikuwa” in Tokyo, while the standard search results give you two pages about Kyoto hotels with Plaza in the name, then degenerate into complete nonsense. You have to get really, really lucky for the phonetically-written パッケージプラザ to show up and send you here.

(Puchi-puchi is the original Japanese trademark for the stuff, and has become as generic as kleenex or hotchkiss)

New market record

We hit nine markets. Flea markets, craft markets, antique markets, etc. It could have been ten, but the “1000 market” at Kiyomizu-dera just hasn’t become interesting yet, so we skipped it. That would have left us with only eight, but as we were walking down Karasuma-dori toward our expensive dinner destination (one of three visits to Hanaroku; four if you count the saké tasting), we walked right through one outside of Higashi Hongan-ji. Hadn’t seen it mentioned on any of the calendars, but it turns out to be an irregular event.

Still regular enough that we ran into several familiar dealers, and were recognized by people we’d bought stuff from at earlier shows. We also got the fun of having a dealer start pitching his product, and us pulling out stuff we’d bought from him years ago.

New hotels

We ended up with three different hotels this trip. The first was for a single night in Tokyo after landing at Haneda and shipping our bags to Kyoto, convenient for getting to the shinkansen station at Shinagawa early in the morning. My sister found cheap rooms at an APA Hotel, but the site she used didn’t make it clear that just having “Shinagawa” and “Station” in the name didn’t mean it was at “Shinagawa Station”; it was at Shinagawa Togoshi Station, 10 minutes away by cab. A little extra travel in the morning, but no big deal.

The rooms were clean but tiny. I was actually kind of surprised they hadn’t found a way to combine the bedroom with the shower stall. I’m sure the neighbors heard my elbows banging into the walls every time I moved.

The second room was for the bulk of our stay, and was selected for the following features: convenience to shopping and tourist-y locations, price, kitchenette, in-room washer/dryer, and real freezer compartment in the fridge. On paper, it looked pretty good, with a Familymart across the street, a Fresco grocery store a few blocks away, Kiyomizu-dera and several shopping districts in walking distance, etc. No immediate subway access, but within a reasonable walking distance, and two nearby bus stops for quick trips to shopping and Kyoto Station. I even went around the neighborhood in Google Street View and found a lot of interesting shops, only half of which were kimono-rental joints.

We missed a few tiny flaws. Like the lack of a consistently-staffed front desk. And the police station across the street. And the huge fire station next door. And the motorcyclists showing off their loud pipes at night. And the steep hills on the walk to the subway stations. And the fact that the neighborhood grocery was closed for renovation until the day before we left. And the half-ply tissues and toilet paper they stocked. We used taxis and Ubers a lot, and noise-blocking earplugs or white-noise generators at night. The buses? Packed like sardines with foreign tourists every time we saw one (so much for coming before cherry-blossom season…).

Each room had a Japanese-style genkan, where you were supposed to take off your shoes before proceeding past the entrance. Sadly, their core market seems to be ignorant tourists who don’t bother, and with only one person there during the day and a small service crew refreshing rooms every three days, the carpets were definitely not in a barefoot-friendly state of cleanliness. The climate-control was also under-specced, so it was fighting a losing battle against the humidity, to the point that the curtains on the balcony door were mildewed at the bottom.

The in-room washer worked well, at least, and they supplied laundry pods to run it as much as you wanted. Despite the machine insisting that it had drying functionality, though, that never worked.

Fortunately, the one thing that truly stood out about their rooms was the shower stall. Short-but-deep tub and a full-room shower with room for my elbows, with high-pressure hot water and a multi-purpose heated fan system that you could set to run for hours.

So not only could you preheat the shower stall, you could dry your towels and your laundry in there.

The chain is Stay Sakura, and they cut costs by having a lot of small buildings with minimal staffing. For luggage delivery and pretty much anything else involving human interaction, you have to go to their customer-service center on the south side of Kyoto Station, which would have bothered us more if we hadn’t been headed to Toji for the flea market the day we arrived in Kyoto, and the shinkansen exits let you out on the south side. So we had a short walk to drop off our carryon luggage, confirm that they would deliver that and our other bags that afternoon, and then off to the market.

Our final hotel was actually nice. We (well, I) had three days in Tokyo at the Courtyard By Marriott Tokyo Station, which has great rooms and really comfortable beds, a terrific location, and Pepsi products not only in the restaurants but free for the taking in the lounge. Also little single-serving Häagen-Dazs containers in several flavors. And beer. Pretty much anything you’d want to buy was “just down the street”, either at Tokyo Station or around the corner. Its only flaw that I could discover was the cabbie-confusing signage that led them to consistently drop you off at the wrong door and pick you up around the corner.

That wasn’t just us. Every English-speaking guest we ran into in the elevators commented on it without prompting. Very minor inconvenience compared to the benefits, so this stands as the only one of the three that we’d stay at again, and would actively seek out.

Amusing note: the Courtyard enhances the experience with custom scents for the hallways. Sadly, I am conditioned to associate “strong odor in hotel hallway” with “covering up a stink”, so it was kinda wasted on me. I suppose their target market has never spent a night in a truck-stop HoJo Motel where even the non-smoking rooms reeked so badly from decades of cigarette smoke that I had to bring in towels from my moving van to take a shower in the morning.

(despite being a “Western” chain that supplied nightshirts instead of yukata, the sizing of their loungewear was still Japanese; in other words, if I’d tried to sleep in the nightshirt, even unbuttoned, I’d have torn out the shoulders)

Speaking of sizes…

George, our saké sommelier, lamented how difficult it was to buy clothing in Japan, having to hunt for the rare 3L sizes just to find shirts and sweats that didn’t look like he’d just had a growth spurt. I was sympathetic, having just bought a samue that was the only 3L in the shop. But that was nothing compared to the pajama listing I tripped over on Amazon Japan where the sizing method was so fucked up that I’d have needed to buy a 7L to fit my shoulders into it. “3L” just meant “circumference 2cm larger than LL”; the length, waist, and neck measurements went up more slowly.

Study material

No, not the big pile of Blurays I bought that featured attractive young women wearing little or no clothing. Or the somewhat-smaller pile of DVDs featuring more than one such woman demonstrating some degree of mutual affection (this particular genre is still not widely being produced on Bluray). This trip, we signed up for some short classes. Specifically, kintsugi, incense-making, and gyoza-making.

My sister had already done a kintsugi class in Tokyo with her work team, and wanted to do it again, making an extra piece as a gift for our mother. The class she’d had before used a variant of real urushi lacquer, which produced a smooth surface for the gilded repairs, but required waiting a month before unpacking your results, to be sure it was dry. The place in Kyoto used tinted superglue for the repair and epoxy brushed with gold dust to produce a raised line along the crack, which made the process faster and much less toxic. Also sufficiently different from what she’d done in Tokyo to be novel.

The incense-making turned out to not be what we expected, being more derived from Chinese medicine than the sort you use to make things smell nice. Still a lot of fun, for us as well as the translator that the booking company sent. We’ll have to peruse their catalog for future trips, because they’ve hit on a good formula: book third-party classes that are only offered in Japanese, and add their own translator for a small fee.

The gyoza class ended up just being the two of us, and nobody got to see our failures because we ate them. Samurai Gyoza Factory a.k.a Ramen Factory Kyoto a.k.a Matcha Factory Kyoto a.k.a Wagyu Ramen & Steak MOKUMOKU is classroom by day, restaurant by night, with a limited but tasty menu.

(the gyoza class introduced us to two new dipping sauces: olive oil with salt & pepper, and teriyaki sauce with kewpie mayo; the oil didn’t work for us, but the teriyaki mayo was awesome)

AirDrop failure modes

Apple’s AirDrop functionality to share files/links with someone nearby worked between the two of us without any issues. It never worked with anyone else, even when both sides set the explicit override and bumped our phones together. This would be acceptable if it were a brand-new feature just out of beta, but Apple’s been promoting this shit for years now. It looks like the handshake process is prone to lengthy timeouts.

(it was tricky to persuade the GenAI model that the phones should not be upright and held up facing the camera)

Pushy drug-store employees

My sister was looking for something in a drug store in Kyoto, when a female employee walked up, informed her that her skin looked terrible, and practically dragged her to a product she recommended.

Later, after she’d gone to New York, I was on the drugstore floor of a Tokyo Bic Camera, and a female employee walked up and informed me that they had excellent products for dealing with hair loss.

Neither encounter went over well.

A Wild Last Boss Disappears!

The light-novel version I bought from Amazon, that is. It’s no longer listed on US Amazon at all. The manga’s still there, but the light novels have been delisted, and there’s no product pages for them. The end result looks exactly like the way Amazon Japan censors adult materials for foreign visitors, but with a different root cause.

You can still read the Kindle editions if you bought them, fortunately.

Meanwhile…

My preorder of The Monster Hunter Files, Volume 2 was auto-delivered to me in Japan. Made for a very nice diversion on the flight home.

Nature is healing

Too tired when I got home to restock the fridge or defrost something to cook, so I ordered good pizza via DoorDash. Unlike almost every recent experience I’ve had where the driver was a 30-ish foreign male with near-zero English and a profile name that screamed “six illegals using the same account”, the driver was a pretty young blonde white gal with a terrific figure and a friendly smile.

Spring is growing season…

Coming soon, perhaps more often than in the first season.

My sister has booked the flights for our next Japan trip, which will now be in March; this Thanksgiving just wasn’t working out for her schedule. That gives me more time to build up my cash reserves, more time to get my knees worked on, and more time to finally go through all the pictures from the last trip…

We’ll be flying in and out of Haneda again, but spending most of our time in Kyoto; this adds two shinkansen trips and luggage transfers, but makes sense because she could get us free business-class upgrades for Haneda, but not for Kansai. So we’ll ship our bags directly from the airport to Kyoto, spend the night near Shinagawa Station, take an early train the next morning, drop off our carry-on bags at the hotel, and spend the first of our 10 days in Kyoto. Then it’s back to Tokyo for a few days of museums, shopping, and penguins.

I’ll be driving up to Mount Hood next month for a week of kumihimo, but that’ll be it for this year, I think. We’ve got a week-long family thing in Sedona in February which will be another long drive, but low-stress.

Apple Maps is still pretty awful in Japan, so we never used it, but Google Maps had a habit of losing track of our position and facing just often enough to repeatedly send us a few blocks out of our way. It was also pretty terrible at recommending nearby restaurants. But it got it right once, and that’s what matters.

In Kyoto, in the basement of the Hotel Kanra, lies the home of what may be the finest meal we’ve ever eaten, Hanaroku. The menu is short, with only three courses and a handful of a la carte options, plus a separate daily special. The drinks menu is more elaborate, but both are seasonal, with the saké flights paired to the food. Preparation and presentation are exquisite, and the staff is quite friendly.

Not only will we go again, we did. We couldn’t stop thinking about the wagyu, so we went back another night and just ordered it a la carte with a full bottle of Kagura.

Here’s a few from my sister, who made more use of her phone camera than I did. She had my old Canon G15 as well, but is used to using her iPhone 8, particularly the portrait mode. I think she took about the same number of pictures with each, where I split my time between the Sony A6500 and a new Sony WX800 compact superzoom (yes, I’m weak…).

I think if we hadn’t both been battling bad knees, I’d have spent a lot more time shooting with the A6500, and even used the longer lens that I brought along, but instead I left it in the hotel unless we were going someplace special (like Ise and Himeji), and just carried the WX800. Not the same quality or ISO range, but tiny and lightweight, with a surprisingly useful 30x optical zoom range.

(yes, my next doctor visit is going to be all about the knees)

Unrelated, while I’ve been holding off on upgrading my iPhone 6 Plus, Apple’s kind of forcing the issue by increasing the memory footprint of all their frameworks. Pretty much every time an app gets upgraded, it gets piggier, to the point that there’s not enough memory to leave something running in the background, like the Sony app that lets my cameras pull GPS from the phone. Whenever I switched between apps, they had to relaunch, which wasted a lot of time.

I’m not a fan of the notched buttonless overpriced face-scanning heavy new models with battery life no better than my 6 Plus, but switching to Android isn’t really an option if you’re tied into the Apple ecosystem (even if you avoid their shitcloud as much as possible).

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My brain’s not up to sorting through all our pictures yet, so here’s a quick assortment of things I snapped with my phone.

Back from Japan, slowly unpacking. Mentally, physically, and electronically. Pleased to report that this survived the trip; I had to remove her from her very large and well-designed box in order to fit everything into my suitcases, but I managed to protect her from all harm.

For future reference, while flying business class allows you to check 70-pound bags with no fee, at least one of the Japanese inter-city luggage transport services has a hard limit of 25 kilograms per bag, which left us scrambling to redistribute dense items, of which we’d purchased plenty.

Finished watching Irozuku on the flight home. Terrific series, and I’m glad that of all the ways to screw up the ending, they chose “none of the above”.

Now, time for more Felbinac!

…is found in little side alleys. We already suspected this, but recent events have confirmed it.

Tenka Gyoza is dead; long live Tenpei Gyoza

It took us most of a week to get down to Osaka, only to discover that our favorite little third-floor hole-in-the-wall gyoza joint closed less than two weeks ago. We had gotten to Dotonbori around 1pm and checked to make sure her sign was still there, but since she didn’t open until 5, we didn’t go up until after we’d done our sightseeing and shopping.

Fortunately, there were two guys inside renovating for the new owner (sounds like it will just be a bar), and one of them knew that she’d retired and sold the place, and recommended we head back up toward Umeda station and try Tenpei.

We each devoured 50 hitokuchi (one-bite) gyoza too quickly to get a picture of them, but here’s their little English sign with a history of the place and the correct proportions for mixing up your own gyoza sauce:

I’d prefer to believe that the lady at the other place invented hitokuchi gyoza, but I’d need to spend a lot more time in Osaka researching the history of this most delicious incarnation of pan-fried dumplings. Tasty, tasty research.

If you want a higher filling-to-wrapper ratio, our other new find is a block up from Shijō off Karasuma in Kyoto, Tiger Gyoza Hall. They have a full menu for some reason, but if you just walk in and say “pukkuri gyoza, hakko”, you’ll be very happy. We’ve been there three times now, and I’m pretty sure there will be another visit before we leave town.

The unbelievably awesome teppanyaki restaurant Hanaroku deserves a post of its own…

Unrelated pro tip: if you use the new SmartEX app to purchase shinkansen tickets, guard that credit card with your life. If you somehow manage to lose the card (first time in my life…), you cannot pick up your tickets. At all.

The workaround is to use the app to cancel and resubmit your reservation with a different card, but this is not a practical solution when it’s the Friday afternoon where the entire country is going on vacation. The girl at the JR counter was politely apologetic, but didn’t think of what seemed obvious to me: have her place the order as soon as I hit the “cancel” button. Once we were synced up, we turned our keys and rebooked the same seats. Crisis averted, and there’s no sign that my card was used by anyone before I reported it lost.

“Happiness is a warm server room.”

No, wait, that’s not right.

“Happiness is rooftop building maintenance that interrupts your server-room cooling, with portable chillers that just aren’t cutting it, followed by a surprise UPS failure that takes down all your servers. While you’re out of the country.”

Could be worse. Instead of canceling our visit to a temple flea market and a shrine festival this morning, it could have happened on Friday afternoon…

Craft Sake Week at Roppongi Hills is a brand-new event. We walked over from our hotel in Shiba, got there just before it opened at noon, chatted with the woman running the show (a charming New Zealander who wanted to make sure the limited foreign-language support she could offer was enough for people), and then spent the next four hours drinking glass after glass of really terrific saké.

Thanks to my sister’s well-honed talent for hitting it off with strangers anywhere in the world, we hooked up with a mother and daughter who were on the latter’s final Spring Break vacation before starting her Master’s program in Economics in London. After working our way through the available offerings, the four of us wandered over to the Kit-Kat Pairing Bar, which used “AI” (no actual AI were harmed by this marketing stunt) to pick the right combination of seasonal Kit-Kat and saké for each of us. Ally, the daughter, promptly cheated and ran through the questions again when she didn’t like the result. We approved.

All told, we spent over four hours drinking and chatting, leaving me drunk enough to feel it, and my far-less-massive sister well into wheeeee! territory. The walk back to the hotel involved much greeting of random pedestrians, a bit of stumbling and weaving, and some cat-herding on my part. The day ended early.

Next up, Saturday with penguins, gyoza, a shinkansen ride, and more gyoza (because our neighborhood tonkatsu curry udon joint was closed for the day).

Meanwhile, I watch our group’s Slack channel for news that the UPS is fixed and the folks on-site can bring up enough infrastructure for me to VPN in and do some sadly-necessary work.

Update

Surprisingly clean recovery, although the UPS required a visit from an electrician to get it back online again, delaying things enough that we got to the flea market a bit later in the day, which made for a somewhat sweatier shopping experience (highs up to 78 this week in Kyoto, with humidity to match).

My knees, shins, calves, and right ankle are vigorously expressing their disapproval of all the walking, while my feet are just in a “we’ll get you for this later, dude” mood. All are responding nicely to a felbinac/menthol lotion I discovered on an earlier trip and picked up as soon as we got here.

Foodwise, we’ve struck out twice trying to visit the katsu curry udon place (pro tip: if you’re going to be closed for multiple days, don’t just put 本日 (“today”) on the sign apologizing for it and leave it up for several days).

Finding Tiger Gyoza Hall more than made up for it. The Pukkuri Gyoza in particular were so good that we were tempted to say “mata ashita” on the way out. And, yes, my sister hit it off with two charming older men who spoke decent English and drank heavily, and it turned out one of them had lived in both Chicago and San Jose. Despite being named “thousand winters”, he confessed to preferring Silicon Valley’s weather over Chicago.

(but we’re still going to try for the katsu curry udon again…)