mikeraggett

From the lakes to the mountains

As we leave the lakes

behind and head off inland

what may lie ahead?

We slept late today only just beating a chambermaid’s knock at the door – check out is ten and it’s now nine-fifteen. Sorry but we needed it. We’re a little late leaving but there’s no discussion of extra charges and it’s all smiles and bows as we depart. Our plan was to circumnavigate one of the bigger lakes, Lake Motosuko, and find the spot from which Fuji is depicted on the ¥1000 note. It’s a clear, warm, sunny day and being a Saturday tourists are out in full cry. The lake is lovely and we find several spots, including the Treasury’s, from which to admire the clearest waters of the lake and the cloud free beauty of the mountain. Being quite high clouds are always a problem when you are looking for that special image.

We then entered the next hotel’s phone number into the SatNav and set off along Route 30 which began with a series of tunnels and then into successive hairpin bends through a pass. It made our route as displayed on the screen look like a coiled snake. Through a stunning landscape which had conifers mingled with fresh burst leaves of acers in the brightest of greens with candyfloss puffs of cherry blossoms punctuating the view – just gorgeous. We felt very happy to be driving Route 30. It headed towards Nagano with surrounding mountains still well capped with snow and a couple of huge downhill ski runs cascading down the mountains. We then hit the plain, joined the Chuo Expressway again and as usual anywhere in the world the drive was efficient but less fun. With a speed limit of 80 kph on the signs I was glad to see the majority of drivers were as partially sighted as me – Dee didn’t think my excuse “I was going with the flow just keeping up with everybody else” would work in a court of law but luckily I wasn’t called upon to produce it.

Off the expressway towards our destination we thought we should fill up the tank as filling stations might not be too numerous in the mountains. I had the phrase ready but when I asked the attendant “Regyuar mandan kudasai” he replied, “Selfo. Press Igris.” The machine burst into life showing grade choices, cash or full tank options and a flashing slot for my credit card. Full tank, all set and they had loos available – much needed after two hours in the car. Easy!

Next stage not quite so good. We drive down the Kiso Valley ogling wood craft factories and shops, lacquer ware outlets as we pass but thinking we should find the hotel(?) first and then explore. SatNav lady informed us we had reached our destination as we stopped outside the cemetery at Tsumago one of the famous post towns on the Nakasendo Trail. Well the words Tsumago did occur somewhere in the address but I wasn’t at all sure we were actually staying in this town. There was a shuttered, derelict looking building to our right, two rather lovely cherry blossom trees just coming out nicely but no sign of anywhere we could sleep.

We accost a likely looking school boy who gets out his iPhone , switches from Kanji to roman input and gets me to enter the name. The result is unclear but my lightbulb flashes and I go to get the tablet and our router to see if Google maps could help. By this time another tourist group has gathered and suggest we go to the Tourist Information Office who should be able to assist. The whole group guide us down the hill to the office where a lady with enough English summons the innkeeper to come and fetch us. He indicates where we should drive and he will meet us at the bus stop which was marked on the town tourist map. The Shimosagaya Hotel that I’d booked on Agoda was described as Japanese style – but even the town map calls it an inn. It’s actually a minshuku a family run B&B. We shed our shoes and climb a steep ladder-like staircase that would have taxed Toddy in his heyday but with Dee’s knee and our multiple luggage it’s a struggle.

The room we’re shown to however is a delight. It’s a six mat tatami room with a table, cushions, hot water and tea and some delicious plums provided as a welcome. Oh and the loo has aheated seat an the “toto wash system” built in – use your imagination. Later while we were dining, the table was moved to one side and futons and duvets were put out for us to sleep. We go out to explore this extremely well restored town of Tsumago on the old route from Kyoto to Tokyo. It has loads of wooden houses from the converted into fairly touristy shops with local crafts – some of the wooden objects were glorious. We’d been told dinner was served at six so we had to hurry back to make ourselves presentable to join other guests.

As for dinner! Well just look at these before and after pictures. We had virtually no idea what we were eating but apart from a couple of pickled root vegetables we polished it off. There was one other couple dining alongside us and a few conversational gambits were exchanged including amazement at our itinerary and some notes about what we were eating.

P1010744

And what were we eating? Our trays included a fish complete with head, skin and bones – although we were encouraged “heado goodo” we were given dispensation to leave the head – some fabulous salmon sashimi, tightly curled fern tops, wasabi leaf with sesame, local vegetables in tempura, a superbly tasty clear miso soup and that future source of protein for all of us – grasshoppers. Yes we have both eaten grasshoppers with enjoyment and delight so we’ll be the survivors when the food runs out.

We’ve now retired to plan tomorrow and blog but even with our own router there’s no signal deep down in the valley in the middle of town so we’ll have to go up to the cemetery in the morning to try to post and work out our route with Google maps or Navitime.

And so to bed.

In Japan

12.04.2013 Murakami Day!

Will we get our wish

to buy the Murakami

and find Mount Fuji?

The alarm rings at 6 a m. We rise to a beautifully sunny Tokyo and get ourselves ready for the queue to buy the new Murakami novel about which no information has been released but speculation has been rife. As I said to Dee on the way, we can be sure that it will involve a forty-something angsty male reminiscing about his youth and failing to make relationships work. Beyond that there will be a context of some kind – maybe political or topical. We’ll see.

We arrive at Books Kinokunia, Shinjuku at seven and declare ourselves first in the queue. Gradually the store staff start to arrange tables outside the shop and finally piles of the coveted tome arrive. At 07:55 Dee makes the first transaction of the day and we have our copy of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage. No our Japanese didn’t suddenly get better – there’s a convenient English translation on the endpapers. Now there is quite a line of people waiting to pay and clearly they are in for a brisk trade so we set off to check out, rent a car and drive to Mount Fuji.

[Because of a couple of wi-fi less days we actually know that the launch caused a much bigger stir in central Tokyo as reported in The Guardian – thanks James and for providing the provenance for our etchings in your comment.]

A swift breakfast coffee on the way – more research really as lots of scenes in the novels are set in coffee shops – and we say goodbye to the e-Hotel and take a cab to Mazda Rent a Car. Except the driver doesn’t recognize the address so it’s back into the hotel leaving the trusty baggage wrangler waiting in the street. Just as I arrive from the hotel with a more precise location I discover that the driver rather than just going to get another fare has been consulting his SatNav and also knows where to go. We conclude the car pick up OK at the office and move to find it in a nearby parking lot. It’s fine and swallows our copious baggage comfortably – good research pays off! The only problem is with the English SatNav we’d ordered – it speaks English but we can only enter destinations with telephone numbers or by using a character conversion chart for katakana – ummm. So we set off to find the Chuo Expressway (more research) and head south towards the Fuji Five Lakes area. It’s a pleasant easy drive and apart from a few bottlenecks where expressways merge we’re off and away. The first sighting of Mount Fuji from the expressway is stunning – its top half still covered in snow and rising as a perfect cone from the surrounding plain. You can understand why it’s one of the most photographed places on earth. The SatNav even gets us right to the hotel in Fujiyoshida although we can’t quite believe it.

In a real Dolphin Hotel moment (Wild Sheep Chase, Dance, dance, dance) we park tentatively rather than under the hotel itself and walk to the door which clearly says Hotel Fuyokaku. There’s no evidence in English as to where reception is but it’s clearly not on the first or ground floor (there’s much about Japan that displays an American influence). So we take the elevator for which someone must have pressed the call button so we are whisked to the fifth floor where chambermaids sit having a break surrounded by piles of sheets and yukatas. We manage to make it clear we want to check in and are sent back to the third floor where a young man emerges from a back office to check us in to room 512. We explain we parked along the access road and will fetch the car to unload. However we’ve been blocked in by a large white Nissan van. So it’s back to reception where our man has vanished and has to be summoned by bell again. He comes out with us to assess the situation, fortunately recognizes the vehicle and goes to fetch the owner. So finally we check in, unpack a bit and prepare to go in quest of Fuji. Now it’s highly visible but doesn’t have a regular phone number to punch into the SatNav so we discover what we hope is the phone number for a useful Tourist Information Centre and supplementing this with the, now map wrangler, doing her very best with inadequate resources, we set off. After a block or two we realize we are heading for a different information centre altogether and not really where we want to go. So with a few twists and turns and some stern admonishments from SatNav Lady we eventually head off up a road that leads to the fifth stage of the ascent – as far as you can go by car. We get out and join the coach parties of Chinese, French and hope that the cloud ringing the summit will clear. Actually it’s not a good photo opportunity anyway – too close and the lakes around its base are too hazy. So we descend and decide to use the tourist map to look for better views from Lakes Kawaguchiko and Saiko.

On the northern shore of Lake Kawaguchiko is a promenade lined with cherry trees which being colder down here is just coming into its prime so we get shots of both cherry blossom and Mount Fuji. The drive round the lake is beautiful and we find a number of other locations where we think we’ll get good views of the mountain.

As the evening draws in the wind gets up, we grab a few final shots, make our way back to the hotel and go out for a beer and something to eat. We arrive at a very friendly noodle bar and order just two beers but as we sit and see how many other locals come to eat there the decision to move on which resulted from our toss of the ¥100 coin – numbers or flowers as there’s no head – we give in, order delicious bowls of ramen and then retire to the hotel.

A day of achievement – we have our Murakami book, we managed to get the car and drive to Mount Fuji and we’ve seen the mountain from most angles possible.

In Japan

A day of culture in Tokyo

With wood block prints to

start our day we wonder what

else will come our way?

After the exhaustion of the last two days we decided on a quietly cultured vacation day. But before we start in on that let’s just share some of the Joys of Japan.

Jazz is alive and well and is the music of choice in most shops, restaurants, coffee shops and bars. It’s usually easy grooving West Coast style jazz and it’s so much less intrusive than relentless pop.
Manners in the main are what we miss in the UK. They are not all perfect – nobody offered us oldies a seat on the metro but in general people are friendly, helpful and polite.
Heated loo seats – Dee was so delighted with her first experience of the high tech loo off the hotel lobby, she insisted I go check it out. This one was brilliant and we’ve now found many others are accompanied by control panels fit for the SS Enterprise that will pre-sterilize the seat, add pleasant odours and wash various parts of your lower body on request – but the best is sitting down on a warm seat.

We have some framed reproductions of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji in our hall at home and are both fans of these delicate, funny and sometimes outrageous wood block prints known as ukiyo-e which were produced as popular art from the mid seventeenth to the early twentieth century. There’s a museum devoted to them in Harajuku which we visited where there was a fascinating exhibition of prints depicting women’s fashions, hair and make-up styles. Who knew the green lower lip was so desirable! There was also a great display which showed the process of making Hokusai’s The Wave an image I guess most people are familiar with. As we left there was a spattering of rain and our eyes were drawn to a line of brightly-hued umbrellas.These were office workers queuing at Harajuku’s trendiest popcorn store to buy popcorn for their lunch! We passed on the opportunity – few things are worth waiting that long for. So we then walked over to the Meiji Park through a little drizzle to the Meiji Shrine in which the immortal souls of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken are preserved in Shinto honour. They were largely responsible for making Japan a modern nation in touch with the rest of the world. It’s such a place of pilgrimage that it was rebuilt from funds raised by public subscription after the war which destroyed it. The Japan Sake Manufacturers also donate these huge barrels of sake each year as a mark of respect. It’s a place of quiet, serious contemplation in the busy city and is clearly valued by many as a place to spend time in, not just somewhere to tick off on the “Let’s do Tokyo Tour”

We had been pretty pleased with ourselves for mastering the Metro to get to the museum but our next trip after a quick lunch involved working out the best route right across the city. We had to find the right entrance to the line we needed and then change midway. The subway is easy to use and a great way of getting quickly around the huge metropolis that is Tokyo. We ended up in Asakusa where I thought I might have bought my etchings but as it transpired no likely shops were spied and the search goes on. However Asakusa has an amazing shopping thoroughfare leading to the Kannon Temple, as it was called in 1981 when I visited but now known as the Senso-ji. Buddhist rather than Shinto the visitors are more expressive with cleansing and incense wafting rituals to be performed before approaching the temple. We captured a few of them…

… and Dee captured Mike still seeking Murakami.

We again attracted the attention and advice of an elderly gent entirely self-taught and fluent in English – from self-help books and listening to the BBC World Service – note to the new regime at Broadcasting House! He was sorry the cherry blossom had been so early this year but thought we might catch some near Mount Fuji tomorrow and told us about the different varieties with their varying shades from almost white to deepest pink. We then strolled around some artisan jewellers, ceramicists – no stand yet Mike but we’re looking – and fabulous fan and fabric stores before getting the subway to the heart of Tokyo shopping – Ginza. Mitsukoshi department store had a marvellous roof garden on the ninth floor overlooking the street where we enjoyed a green plum and, separately, black sesame icecream. We’ve all seen the pictures of Ginza crossing but it is really incredible to see the sheer number of people late into the evening who descend onto and beneath this world-famous street. Again in the interests of finding Murakami’s Japan we had to visit the subterranean bars that lead from Ginza to Shinbashi where so many people and some of his characters seem to finish off their working day. Ours ended with a visit to – oh come off it! – a tapas bar just off the Ginza with Basque pintxos and Rioja. Then the subway back to the hotel to write. Oh and we ordered and printed out our baseball ticket for next moth in the local convenience store on the way- what a service!

An early night is needed as we have a six a m alarm set to be the first to buy the new Murakami tomorrow.

In Japan

The chase is on! … continued

Will our first day in

Japan be a lot of fun

or will we just sleep?

Riding the Narita Express is a very pleasant experience – comfortable, a trolley drinks service and train attendants who bow as they enter or leave every compartment (or coach as the announcements have it) whether there are passengers within or not. It’s strange to our eyes and minds and gives us an insight into the fact that for all it’s modernity Japan still retains some hard-wired traditions. There are news and weather updates on the flat screens at the front of each coach with very useful journey information as well as lots of ads of course. But Express is a bit of a generous appellation in my book. We left Narita at 10:48 and got to Shinjuku at 12:08 so an hour and twenty minutes for 50 miles seems less than arrow let alone bullet speed.

Just before we left we watched a documentary made by a friend’s company called “Shinjuku – the world’s busiest train station”. It was fascinating and just about prepared us for the warren of bemused foreigners (us included) and thousands of purposefully striding locals on their lunch breaks that met us. Finding an exit that would would lead to a taxi rank all the while struggling with our four suitcases remember, involved two lift rides, an escalator and a false exit before we found it at last. Again one had been somewhat forewarned but to get into a spotless very boxy vehicle – maintenance is obviously brilliant as all the cabs we’ve seen look very old models – and find lacy antimacassars and seat backs and the driver in white gloves. Oh I’ve got some suggestions for the black cab fraternity and their minicab competitors! The stern lady at Narita Express tickets had suggested we should expect to pay between ¥1000 and ¥2000 depending on traffic conditions. Well they must have been superb since the fare was ¥710 and tips are not expected in Japan.

We couldn’t check into our hotel until three o ‘clock so we deposited our bags in what wouldn’t have disgraced the lost luggage at Baker Street – clearly hundreds of people arrive on early flights and can’t check in till later. So we set off in quest of first some lunch and then Murakami’s new book.

We walked around the immediate area looking at plasticized menu pictures of strange combinations and eventually settled on a 24-hour self-service place where we could choose our own food – and the two large, very much needed beers you see. It proved all rather Murakami as the staff were constantly screaming – pleasantries and encouragement I hope – at each other and then I looked out of the window and saw this.

It transpired that they were “The Shinjuku Robots” parading the streets on a float to publicize a forthcoming Shinjuku event. However in the middle of a day with no sleep it was food for thought. I’m sorry I hadn’t time to rush out and get a front on view but the traffic lights don’t wait that long.

But lunch was long enough to get us into the room, have a shower and then set off in search of news of Muarakami’s new book. Now the room – I recall a congratulatory post that we’d booked our first room for only £65 a night. Well it’s fine – the hotel is very well located, the lift works and for once we are not in the room furthest from it. However it might be a good place for Nakata (a character in Kafka on the Shore) to talk to or even interrogate cats but he certainly couldn’t swing one. However it’s fine for two nights, provides an extensive range of toiletries and towels and a yukata and slippers for each of us.

Refreshed we set off and walk towards where I think Kinokunia Bookstore should be. Passing a small shrine, a baseball batting cage like a gold driving range and several young ladies who start to offer me cards until they see Dee and hastily recover their doorway stations, we find Kinokunia, confirm publication at 08:00 on 12 April and suggest there will be a queue of about 80 waiting to get the latest Haruki fix. We’ll be there, sporting a unique 1Q84 tee shirt gained at the London launch of that book.

Making our way back to the hotel we encounter a delightful elderly gentlemen who asks us where we come from, is amazed at the length and breadth of our trip and offers helpful suggestions for good things to see in the area. We were at one of these, the Hanazomon Shrine, an oasis of peace in the midst of hectic, trendy Shinjuku. Through the line of torii in the right hand picture if you look carefully you can see at the end the gold fascia lettering of Emporio Armani – a real god meets mammon moment. It surprised me thirty years ago to see people come from their offices wash themselves ritually and go and stand before the shrine, say a few words of prayer and clap their hands to ensure their prayers were heard. I find it amazing today.

Sated with spiritualism we then moved off into the heart of Shinjuku’s “entertainment district”. Never has so much neon been burned in attracting people to spend their money. It’s truly amazing. We walked the streets, wondering at the large amounts of hanging about on street corners by both young men and women – some were certainly trying to get us to dine at their establishment but probably not all of them. However, resisting their blandishments we chose a bar of our own liking, had a couple of beers as many of Murakami’s characters do in this part of town and then went off for dinner. But not before exchanging meishi and becoming lifelong friends.

Then back to the hotel via an interesting punch in the number to select your dish, pay in advance diner which was actually rather good and then to bed for one of us and to blog writing for the other, the results of which you know. It’s midnight again and we have to be up early to be in the queue at Kinokunia, so sayonara and Thursday’s news will have to wait until tomorrow.

Uncategorized

The chase is on!

So, from Gate Five Two

can the great white bird fly us

to our wonderland?

Alarm clock goes off. 7:00 am. Time to finish packing, put on washing machine and dishwasher and prepare to leave. London: grey,wet chilly. Look at the weather forecast for Tokyo: 21 C and sunny. Oh where would we rather be? Pick up newspaper from the door mat. I thought I’d have the last delivery today as there would be time to read it on the way to the airport. What a mistake that was. Totally full of The Iron Lady Who Was Not for Turning; page after page of the stuff, guff and ill-remembered hagiography. Thankfully she didn’t make the sports pages although I quite expected a piece on her captaincy of Grantham Girls’ Netball team to feature. OK so some of you reading this will hold a differnt view but hey let’s get on and right the ills that face us now. At least we won’t be around for the funeral and all the attendant outpourings. Dee’s window for a break proves to be excellent timing after all.

So that and what follows should have been posted at Heathrow before we left but both WiFi networks available at Terminal 5 were barred by my system as posing severe threats. So by the time this sign came up I was a doubly-distressed would-be traveller. This was not however until after a little last minute shopping in Boots and elsewhere which seems to accompany any trip however well planned.

The flight itself was long but uneventful and entirely sleep-free on account of leaving London at 13:30 and not being tired until shortly before we arrived in Japan some eleven hours later. Ah well we’ll just have to keep up and get going. One of the excellent flight crew who looked after us in our cleverly selected emergency-exit-extra-legroom seat was amazed at the scope of our voyage into the relatively unexplored – at least by westerners – hinterland as well as the beaten track. She also confirmed sadly that not only had hanami come early this year because of the unusually warm spring (hands over ears Brits) but that last weekend there had been extremely strong winds which had blown much of what remained away. Ah well.

Until I phoned the airline to check that we could consolidate our two 20 kg allowances into one suitcase (we can’t) we had planned to travel with a cabin sized bag each and one large case between us to make travel around the country much of it by train, in-and-out of hotels etc easier to manage. Having checked two in off a trolley and taken one hand luggage piece each was fine but the fun began after passing through fairly efficient immigration and customs at Narita Airport. We had decided to travel into the centre with the Narita Express so Dee waited with the bags while I went to buy the tickets. It’s a good deal if you buy a ticket and a SUICA prepayment card together as you get a substantial discount and ¥2000 credit on the plastic top up card that can be used on almost all Tokyo transport and in a number of shops as an alternative to cash. I emerge with our tickets timed for the 10:18 and with seats 3A and B in Coach 9 reserved. All most splendid. Almost! Dee wanted to photograph one of the amazing vending machines that are found in locations all over the city and I suspect the country.

This diversion was entirely worthy as they are amazing machines BUT it did mean that what with faffing about with four suitcases through a barrier and trying to get down an escalator, we missed the 10:18. A very friendly attendant said Dee should stay with the bags while I went to change the tickets. Isn’t it funny how a smiling, utterly polite ten-minutes-before Noriko can strike real fear into you with the words, “You must catch the 10:48. I can change this only once!” Boy did I scuttle back only to have former friendly platform assistant forget who I was and make me go back through the barrier before allowing me to rejoin my baggage wrangler wife.

When we did finally get onto the platform it was great to have confirmed what we’d been told that all rail signs are in English and Japanese and the loading of trains by coach and seat number is highly efficient and what helps the trains to run on time. I had hoped to post a picture of a very stylish Narita Express train but after carefully focusing the camera on where a good shot would be the bugger crept up – or rather whooshed up on me from the opposite direction and I had to abandon it and get the bags on board. The other thing to say not just down in the station and on the train itself but elsewhere is how clean everywhere is. As we expressed in towards Tokyo it became clear that we’d arrived on Washday Wednesday. House after house, apartment block upon apartment block had lines of laundry hanging out in the increasingly sunny day.

There’s lots more and we haven’t even reached Tokyo yet but as it’s nearly midnight here and I’ve been without sleep for about 35 hours you’ll have to wait for tomorrow for the next instalment.

However the Murakami quest has started in earnest with some highly professional research visits to Shinjuku bars and some details about the launch of the new novel on Friday.

Getting ready

All set and a plea for information

Just two days to go

yen here, vouchers printed, now

can we get some help?

We’re are now in the very excited build up to actually going on this trip at last. It became even more exciting this week when Japanese currency arrived. I’d shopped around at banks, the post office and travel agents to find not very good rates. In a week when the Japanese government poured trillions of yen into the economy to kickstart inflation and recovery, the yen fell against the pound and the dollar. However exchange rates are slow to respond – a bit like prices at the filling station – quick to go up when oil prices rise, slow to come down when they fall. Rather warily I ordered them online – well there was a bank holiday weekend in the way but they turned up fine as planned. I had looked at several sites and found the best rate and excellent service from TravelFX.com who kept me informed of progress throughout the process. Here they are: ¥1000 somewhere between £6 and £7; ¥5000 about £34 and ¥10000 about £65 – well today anyway!

There were two other important pieces of preparation. Being a little unhappy to rely entirely on showing electronic booking forms to hotels and car hire desks we decided to print out all our booking confirmations and vouchers. Our good friend Toddy posted earlier that we would need a “sturdy binder” for all of them. He was right as you can see and thank goodness we’re not on Easyjet or Ryanair with cabin luggage weight restrictions.

The other sprang from some great advice from the superb practice nurse at our local NHS surgery. Dee is suffering from a bout of sinusitis at present and was a bit concerned about its effect on the ear and head pain she usually suffers during take off and landing. “Get ear planes,” we were told. So we did. They are little clear rubbery earplugs with a grometty spiral at the outer end which helps to balance pressure and prevent pain. Sounds great, we’ll find out in a day or so if they work.

And now I wonder if anyone out there can help me? When I was in Japan in 1981, I bought a series of four etchings which we’re extremely fond of and would like to find out a bit more about. I photographed them and took them in to the ever-helpful Alisa at the Japan National Travel Office in London to see if the titles or the artist’s name would provide any clues and maybe point us at the locations they depicted. The titles proved descriptive but non-specific in terms of finding out in which part of Japan they might be. Up in the Hills, Green Fields, Poplars and Red Bird are accurate but unhelpful. She was also unable to provide a secure reading of the artist’s signature so I’m posting the etchings and a close up of the signature below and if anyone recognises places or the artist we’d really love it if you could post a comment to let us know.

The etchings:

and the signature.

Thanks for your comments, feedback and suggestions. Now for the real fun!

Getting ready

Cards and passes and car classes

Deciding to go

is all very well, but what

about some action?

So the sums so far show us that we can probably make our dream trip come true. Hotels are booked but all still cancellable up to a couple of days before we’re due. Some things will need to be bought and paid for now so it’s time to reach for the card wallet and do the job in earnest.

Talking of cards reminds me that business cards were very big when I was there before. This is principally a holiday but we do have a production company that can operate anywhere so after a quick discussion we agree that a joint meishi would be a worthwhile investment. In one of the quickest searches ever up pops the excellently named Japanese business cards dot com. I approach them and a couple of others and their costs seem reasonable so I set about designing our card English one side, Japanese on the other. They translate them as well and send a proof. I asked a Japanese speaking contact to tell me what I, Dee and the company did from just the Japanese side and the translation was spot on. So here we go handing out meishi – with both hands of course as etiquette dictates – to all and sundry. As it’s a joint card maybe we should hold one corner each as we hand them over. The guide doesn’t cover that. Here’s what it looks like:

That’s one task ticked off on the ever-growing Japan Trip Checklist that we both add to all the time. My next tasks are to try to sort out car rental and to buy our Japan Rail Passes. The former still proves rather tricksy – huge charges for one-way rentals, confusion over actual vehicle sizes because they are all called something different but we will get there.

The rail pass on the contrary couldn’t be easier. Buying online or in person are both possible. I opted for online, completed my form, paid the fees and received confirmation of both order and despatch. That’s when the trouble started. The letter needed a signature on a particularly wet Saturday when we were out. Red card from the postman to collect it from the delivery office. After two visits at which I was told “it hasn’t come back from the walk yet” I began to worry that our passes might not reach us but they were sent recorded delivery so insurance would cover them wouldn’t it?

Third time proved lucky although the muddy, torn envelope didn’t inspire confidence – “our post bags all leak” said the postie at the delivery office. Quickly home and open it up to find two gloriously sunny folders each with an exchange voucher each that will get us our actual rail passes in Japan. It feels like we’re on holiday already as the snow blankets the UK again.

So to car rental again. Given the different naming conventions of most vehicle manufacturers depending on the territory – who can forget the Mitsubishi Starion – we have no real idea what we are being offered in the quotations and whether our luggage will fit. I’d love to be backpacking and not have the bother but it might be a bit more of a struggle than either of us can cope with. So there will be suitcases and they need to be concealed within the boot when we’re on the road. We set off armed with a tape measure and case dimensions to visit local Nissan and Mazda dealerships. We have a Toyota Prius and know that we can fit them in there should we be offered one. But Nissan Tiida and Mazda 3 or 5 seem to be the most popular classes of vehicle on offer.

Having spent a lot of time filming in dealerships it was with a certain degree of embarrassment that I enter first Ancaster and then T W White and Sons with the sole purpose of checking out boot sizes (trunks for our US readers). The staff couldn’t have been more polite when faced with this odd request. It seems we don’t have the equivalent of the Tiida in the UK but that the Note is the most likely equivalent. At Mazda however the policy of naming by numbers pays off and we confirm that the Mazda 3 – considerably more economical in fuel and beneficial to our budget than the 5 or the Tiida – will fit the bill. We have a long chat to a self confessed boy-racer who reckons even he gets good fuel economy so the scales tip in favour of Mazda. One final email to Mazda Car Rental, which incidentally will change its name to Times Car Rental before we arrive, to get a re-quote for the Hokkaido leg and car hire can be ticked off the list.

Now to get some currency, check in and off we go!

Getting ready

How shall we find Murakami and his places?

We’ve read all the books,

the music, the food, the who –

can we find the where?

With the added excitement of a new Haruki Murakami novel being published while we’re in Japan we’ve set about rereading them all for clues as to their settings. Some are clearly specified, others are vague, composites or invented. However we plan to track down as many as we can. For his last book 1Q84 the publishers Shinchosa have mapped the locations in considerable detail. Each pin opens up to show where certain actions in the novel take place but as they are all in Japanese I have to make do with a Google translation which often leaves a rather vague and confused account of what I suspect – and sometimes recall – lies behind them.

The locations range from Expressway Number 3 where the world of 1Q84 begins for Aomame to the Hotel Okura where a significant act occurs. Incidentally I stayed at the Hotel Okura in 1979 and 1981 when I first visited Japan. Sadly for this trip it’s way out of our budget range but we’ll visit for a cup of tea. I hope they still have the brilliant ikebana arrangements that used to grace the lobby each morning. I’ve just discovered that there’s a festival of gardening at the Okura while we’re in Tokyo so we’ll definitely be going there.

There were also some helpful location pointers in a New York Times article by Sam Anderson shortly after the publication in English of 1Q84. The very helpful staff at the London office of the Japan National Tourism Organization also sent me links to a series of walks in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan based on Murakami’s books and a detailed list of locations where Norwegian Wood was filmed which may prove an interesting comparison for our own thoughts about the locations in that book which was the first we read and still have in its red and green two volume form. The film was good but I wasn’t always sure that the locations selected matched how I’d imagined them. But hey not many films do do they?

N Wood box

It’s been a great opportunity to revisit all the novels and short stories – this time with the added advantage of having them all on Kindle as well so we can make notes, highlight passages and then investigate actual and likely locations and add them to our itinerary. And boy do these books repay rereading! So much nuance, detail and context that slip by in the first read make it a fresh, fabulous journey into Mondo Murakami.

Getting ready

Railways, expressways and byways

Can Hyperdia

and Navitime help me to

calculate the costs?

So I have an itinerary, the hotels are booked and we know what they will cost. I know the basic cost of a Japan Rail Pass and I discovered that you can actually buy them online from JRPass.com. The passes are great as they show huge savings over the rates for all our journeys as a few enquiries on the web soon reveal. They come in 7 day, 14 day and 21 day versions. Japan Rail Passes are only available to non-Japanese citizens and you have to buy a voucher before you travel and exchange it for a pass once you arrive in Japan or when you need to start using it. In our case we’ll start to use it in Kyoto for the remaining 21 days of our trip since the first few days are in Tokyo or in a rented car. So, that cost can be added to the spreadsheet.

Next, car rental. When I first looked at this back in February I couldn’t get anywhere since most of the car hire companies hadn’t published their spring and summer rates – ominous. Nissan Rent a Car did have rates on their site and so I entered dates and places to get an estimate of costs for the Hokkaido leg of the trip. In my inbox next morning was a confirmation and a request for payment so I had to reply that I wanted to cancel the booking as I had not yet decided on whether and when we were coming to Japan. Hope it doesn’t leave a black mark against my name on file should we need to use Nissan for real. However it did give me a good idea of a daily rate including English SatNav, unlimited mileage and insurance which I could then use to calculate the rest of our trips for car.

But once we are in the car how to calculate time and cost of journeys? I fiddled around with Google Maps and various other sites and eventually came across Navitime‘s Journey Pro where you can enter your start and end points – in this case our first day of car hire to go from Shinjuku in Tokyo to Mount Fuji. Based on picking up a car at the station the site was able to locate our hotel in Fujiyoshida. It provides a complete stage by stage route – and marvellous device – it tells you distance, time it’ll take and toll costs. Interestingly it also tells you how much it would cost to do it by taxi! Maybe long distance taxis are common in Japan – we’ll find out perhaps. I had an idea of average fuel consumption for the class of car we’ll be renting and fuel cost so I could now work out all our road travel costs. What is brilliant as you’ll see in these two screen shots is that it shows the route on toll roads or on national roads. In our case it’s a significant difference 1 hour 40 minutes and ¥3600 (£25) or 4 hours and 9 minutes. I think we’ll take the expressways especially as they are marginally greener too – oh yes the CO2 emissions are on there too. The byways might be more fun but we will get to drive on several non-expressway segments of our route later on.

Navitime expressway route

Navitime national general road route

So with lots of fuel consumption, mileage and currency conversion formulae in Excel I was able to ascertain a pretty good idea of costs for the least predictable part of the trip. Just hope the decimal points are all in the right place because the spreadsheet shows we can do it for nearer what we wanted to spend than what we were told we could expect to spend. Only time will tell but we go into the next phase with some degree of confidence. Up until now everything I’ve booked has been able to be cancelled without charge. However the time has come to say:

“We are going in search of Murakami’s Japan.”

Maps reproduced courtesy of Navitime

Getting ready

Booking, booking, booking

As the week unfolds

what shall we now discover

to threaten our trip?

With the little frisson of Takayama Festival safely behind us I settle down to the slog of going stage by stage, train by train, car hire by car hire through the whole itinerary. My daughter-in-law commented on an earlier post with a fine Japanese word for us – Ganbatte. Apparently a literal translation would be Exhaust yourself but it’s used as an encouragement to hang on in there, chin up, stick with it or come on my son. With this exhortation taken to heart and being of a thorough, and cost-conscious nature I start out consulting about four or five sites for each location. A pattern soon emerges – the Japan based sites with the extra hassle of converting yen or dollars to pounds soon start to fall by the wayside with fewer and fewer hits from me among the forest of tabs open across the top of my screen. Then there’s the tedium of consulting my master plan to see what dates to enter and the number of nights for each hotel and entering them in different formats on each site.

I discover that to select a hotel I think will be appropriate, bookmark it for ratification later in the day by Dee who doesn’t share my benefit of working from home and book it with a secure ability to cancel with no fee all takes about an hour to an hour and a half depending on the destination. Choosing the one hotel with a room near Takayama should have been speedy but I still had to look at all the SOLD OUT ones before I got there. Even checking the “show only available rooms” option is not infallible as it doesn’t filter for my choice of a double room so I look at a lot of hotels with only singles. It’s time consuming, frustrating and one day I’ll invent a proper booking site that meets all my criteria.

Oh do stop whinging! It may take a while but you are going to Japan! Get over it and get on with it! My alter ego always was most encouraging. Eventually it seems the best option for me is to use Trivago.com to do a comparative trawl and then as it transpires select the best option on either Booking.com or Agoda.com which always seems to have the lowest rates between them – sometimes one, sometimes the other with no real pattern, rhyme or reason.

Three days later, I finally manage to get a spare hour or so to show Dee my selections. She starts to glaze over after about the fifth but we plough on and agree that without her looking at all the available options herself I’ve done a good job. Well time will tell won’t it?

I’m fairly comfortable with e-tickets, showing my phone to go to the cinema, green about recycling and cutting down on paper but I can’t resist printing out each booking confirmation – being careful just to include the core information and not the other three pages of guff that incautious printing from websites always seem to include. At the top of each I write the hotel number and the dates we’re staying there. The last one reads “Hotel 15, 3 to 9 May Tokyo”. So we have accommodation for every night of the 29 nights we’ll spend chasing all over Japan except for one night on a train still to be booked.

There’s a map of our day-by-day schedule on the blog but the main stages are:

1	Tokyo	2 nights	2	Mount Fuji area	1 night	3	Kiso Valley	1 night
4	not too far from Takayama	2 nights	5	Kanazawa	1 night	6	Kyoto	3 nights
7	Okayama	2 nights	8	Takamatsu	2 nights	9	Kobe	2 nights
10	Osaka	1 night		Train Osaka – Hakodate	1 night	11	Hakodate	1 night
12	Tomakomai	1 night	13	Sapporo	1 night	14	Asahikawa	2 nights
15	Tokyo	6 nights

And then Hong Kong for four nights where we hope free accommodation might be on offer.

So far so good – it looks like it will work but now to gauge the distances, train fares, mostly with a Japan Rail Pass – but the extras for sleepers – car hire, fuel costs and expressway tolls to give us an accurate estimate of what it will cost and whether I or the tour operator experts were right.