Kusatsu - Coffee, Toast, Footbaths and Ice Cream.

After our amazing breakfast, clearly we needed to consume more, so we went for butter toast (Buhtah Toast-u!) and really, really good coffee.  It turns out that in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Japanese got it in their heads to heavily westernize, one of the things they picked up along the way and then went crazy over was great coffee.  So just off the main square in Kusatsu (which is beautiful) is a tiny coffee shop called Caravan Coffee where we went each morning, which was run by a single coffee junky who roasted his own beans, as far as I could tell, and used the vacuum pot method to make me an "Almond Au Lait" that morning that was to die for.

It was delightful, a small place with about five tables, full of old wall clocks (all perfectly synchronized of course)--including some really lovely art deco ones.


Afterwards we walked up the hill to the public park, baths and footbaths area.  It was a really delightful little developed area with lots of nice walkways and lovely little sitting areas were you could soak you feet in the Onsen.

It was also riddled with stacked stones, since people are charmingly the same the world over, in some ways.

And I learned of a lovely tradition I didn't know about: statues are given scarves and hats here, in the winter.

Also, in keeping with the Japanese "you want information, here's ALL THE INFORMATION" mentality: there park had a little thermometer with a delayed ink system of some sort?  The result was an analog thermometer that still tells you the most recent high and low temperature.  Pretty neat.

Afterwards, for lunch (since we knew dinner would be amazing and we didn't want to eat a full meal. . . we got ice cream.  We found a shop that sold ice cream and sprinkled it with toasted sesame see shards, which was delicious.

One of my traveling companions pointed out he had never seen scooped ice cream in the country--it was always served soft-serve style, and this place was an interesting example of that.  The ice cream wasn't from a soft-serve machine, it was scooped, but to serve it to customers, they put it into a counter-top press, which they would then use to turn the ice cream into soft-serve style at the moment of sale.   Truly the most extra of ways to sell ice cream.

We speculated that you can buy pints or half gallons of ice cream in the store here, but that perhaps you are expected to go home and use your own home-use countertop ice cream press to make it soft-serve, and the Japanese equivalent of eating the cookie dough straight from the tube is eating ice cream without making it soft-serve first.

Having dawdled enough around town that our hotel would welcome us back, we returned and took a brief nap before dinner.

The First Onsen Breakfast

Delightfully, Breakfast had a similar (thought slightly more restrained) diversity of flavors to dinner.  Also, the first one came in the most awesome three stage bento serving system.  Absolutely gorgeous presentation.

I continually marveled at the aesthetic care and design sense being put into each plate.

These little river fish were included with our breakfast.  Delicious.

Shabu-shabu is a dish that is cooked at the table--you boil your ingredients in broth as you eat and chat with your dining companions.  It's delightful.  This restaurant did it for breakfast, with some of the best thinly sliced meats I've ever had.  You know, because that's how they do Monday mornings around here, apparently.

The First Onsen Dinner.

  So, after showering off and cleaning up from my Onsen experience, I headed down to the dining room and met my companions.

My experiences with food had been challenged by Tokyo. . . but the chef in this little hotel on the side of a Japanese Volcano was about to rewrite the book.

I can't really describe Japanese cooking well, I don't think.  I don't know many of the terms, and I honestly don't know exactly what most of what we ate was.

But it was delicious.  The flavor choices were super-intentional, with sauces that combined with dishes in startling, sometimes awe-inspiring ways.  Often throughout the new three days my compnaions and I would take a bit of something, and have to stop, marvel, and then talk at length about how the flavors worked together.  The service was attentive, with plenty of care taken to how the plating was presented and the delivery of new courses in elegant, unobtrusive ways.

The pictures I took will never do those meals justice, but I hope that the incredible diversity is conveyed by them.

Side note: I am quite sure I forgot at least one (if not two!) whole courses in almost every one of these series, I'm sorry you won't get to see pictures of everything.

Off to the Onsen

On Sunday we departed from Tokyo via a train out of the city, and switched to a bus that took us to Kusatsu.  Kusatsu is a tiny mountain town with an economy centered around one of Japan's most popular Onsens.  An Onsen is a Japanese hot spring--often heavily plumbed and routed, the Onsen water will be diverted to various foot baths and public baths in the area, plus generally diverted to traditional inns as well, which would otherwise be called Ryokans, but are also called Onsens, if they provide their own bathing facilities using the Onsen waters.

Kusatsu is a lovely little village of about 6,500 people, with a lot of steep and narrow winding streets and beautiful little haphazard buildings that have been built up to support the tourist industry there.

We were staying in a traditional Onsen that my companions had utilized before, and they had told me that I should spring for the food that came included in the booking, if you selected it.  The room itself wasn't too expensive, and the food basically doubled the price--but my traveling companions definitely know what they are on about, so I had booked it as instructed without a second thought.

As you'll see over the coming posts, that was absolutely the right call.

When we arrived I found that the rooms were spacious and delightful; They were rambling little spaces full of Japanese design elements I've grown quite fond of.  I'll try to talk about some of those design elements in a later post, but here's a brief picture tour of my little suite.

Facing inward from the door to my room.

There's a little foyer, around the corner to the left is the toilet area, through the door on the right is the tiny bathroom and shower/tub room.  The tub is tiny but the odds that you'll be bothering with it at an Onsen are super-low, so who cares?

Adorably, the bathroom is set down a step, like the foyer area (where you took off your shoes because you're not some dirty vagrant) and so includes its own special toilet-room-slippers.

Yes, really.

A 360 panaroma of my room.  I took this on the last morning, while the room was configured for sleeping.  During the day the room was actually reset so that the beds were put away and there was just the nice low table in the middle of the room.  During dinner an attendant would come up to your room each night and reconfigure it for sleeping, which was a really lovely little touch that made you feel very well attended to.

Traditional Japanese Onsens are mostly public affairs (segregated by gender), and are also not clothing-optional.  They are nudity-mandatory, so private Onsen are also available for booking for more modest individuals.

In my case, years in the Army leave me worried very little about being naked in front of other dudes, but bumbling your way through a new experience while in the company of other people and figuring out things like "how hot is this water?  Is there a way to change the temperature?  Oh lord I'm dying am I going to catch fire?" and so on are best done on your own, so when my traveling companions were booking their private baths, I had them book one for myself as well so that I could figure all that stuff out in private.

After dropping off my bags, I got changed into my yukata, and it was off to the Onsen!

What's a yukata you ask?

So, one of the things that I didn't know would happen when we arrived was: we'd be told to pick out a yukata.  Turns out that hanging out in an Onsen is not a thing you do in street clothes, so you'll be picking out a lovely sort of minimalist kimono each afternoon.  Much simpler than what you assume when you hear kimono, but pretty and practical.  Unless you're going out to wander around the town during the day (which you will do, because they need to clean so from 10:00 to 14:30 you're going to go find a way to entertain yourself please and thank you), you'll stay in your yukata pretty much the whole time.

There's an extra robe that you can throw over the yukata if you're the type that wants to be warm, and a jacket with pockets and deep sleeves with a notch in them that can work for storing your room keys and phone.

 

So, uh, yeah.  I got all dressed up.

And then it was off to the private Onsen.

The undressing room:

In between the undressing room and the Onsen tub is the bathing room, because getting in your hot springs bath tub before cleaning yourself would be disgusting and no-one but some filthy monster foreigner would do that.

So you come into a little sort of godliness-airlock, and wash your bits.

And then you go outside into the nature (almost all such traditional Onsen are outside, and delightfully Kusatsu was covered in Snow at the time we were there), and submerge yourself in the water that has recently had an intimate tour of an ACTIVE VOLCANO AND HOLY CRAP HOW CAN IT BE THIS HOT.

See that stick with the square at the bottom of it in the front of the picture?

You're going to use that to aerate the water, forcing cold air to mix with the hot onsen water so that it's a survivable temperature for your weakling self.

At which point it's kindof great.  Here's totally scandalous proof that I did the thing.

And really, once you're in, it's amazing.  You feel incredibly clean, and relaxed, and then you just spend the time you're relaxing slowly getting hotter and eyeing the feed source that keeps trickling incredibly hot water into the tub you're in, and slowly raising the temperature until you have to reach for the stick.

Pictured above: my friend/nemesis the Onsen water source.

All in all, I'd say it was an excellent experience.  10/10, would stew in volcano water again.

Tokyo Overdrive Part II: Shibuya and Ramen, Shinjuku and Sukiyaki.

My companions and I slipped out of the train station in Shibuya, the shopping district.

I'm sorry, I capitalized that wrong.  There is a solid argument to be made that Shibuya isn't "the shopping district." It's "THE shopping district."

If there is a megalopolis of malls, it's Shibuya.

We were there for three reasons.  Ramen, spectacle, and actual shopping.  One of my traveling companions wanted a bathing suit for The Spa at Andaz (remember that infinity pool? Yeah.), so we were going to swing through one of the two 109s.

First we got Ramen.  Our Ramen place was our second choice, since our first had a very long line, but it was absolutely lovely.  On the small side with just 7-8 seats and enough space for two people to work during the rush, but usually run by one if things were quiet.

I got a Cha Su pork ramen with shio and bone broth.  While the pork didn't hold a candle to Menya Musashi, the broth was delicious and piping hot and had excellent flavor, and (and this was clutch!) they included pure garlic paste and a little bit of vinegar as condiments, which led to a realllllllly unique and powerful flavor.  Just the thing for scrambling around on a chilly winter day.

For no particular reason, this ramen place played hip hop music throughout our meal, which was excellent.

Around the corner from our tiny, antiquated ramen shop was one of the busiest shopping districts in the world.  We walked a block to the Scramble crossing.  You know that crazy intersection in every movie/advertisement/piece of media that involves Tokyo?  The one where people just go every direction at once?  That's the scramble crossing. 

We stood for a few minutes watching the flood of humanity that breaks over the intersection like a wave cresting a sea wall and did a bit of people watching.  Then it was off to the 109.

The Shibuya 109 ("Ichi-Maru-Kyu" - literally "One Zero Nine") is a roughly ten story tall shopping mall owned by a conglomerate called Tokyu Group.   It's the flagship store but there are several others.  The 109s can be thought of as a sort of "department store"--in roughly the same way that the Schwerer Gustav was a type of "gun."

Shibuya 109 is huge, and dedicated entirely to womens clothing and fashion.  There's a separate store (109Men's) just for men's fashion.

(Fun side note: "Ichi Maru Kyu" is a form of high-altitude wordplay--in Japanese "Tokyu" sounds very similar "tō + kyū"  which would translate as "Ten-Nine.")

The interior of a Shibuya store is almost impossible to photograph in a way that conveys what you're surrounded with. . . so here's a picture of the Matcha Parfait that one of my my traveling companions and I consumed while our cohort was shopping.

Ice cream and fruit cravings satisfied and shopping complete, it was off to Shinjuku station, and dinner.

Shinjuku station is the largest public transit/transport hub in Tokyo, which also means it's the largest such hub in the world.  By a long shot.

On average, 3.6 million people will pass through Shinjuku every day.  There's been about 500 words so far in this post and the average person reads 250 words per minute.  That means that in the time it took you to get here from the moment you read the title, five thousand people have passed through that station.  It's massive and complex and aggressively Japanese.  It is, of course, completely infested with shopping malls.  The whole thing is a maze of stores and trains and lost tourists and (reassuringly) lost locals who clearly have been here many times and still just can't find the damn platform for the train they need.

It's bananas.

We were there to do a little shopping (of course!) which went well, and afterwards we headed to a place called Imahan just south of the station for a dinner of Sukiyaki.

Sukiyaki is one of many cooked-at-the-table dishes that the Japanese have invented or refined.  In modern times it'll generally be an induction cooker in the table which heats a skillet with a mixture of water vinegar and soy sauce that you'll simmer vegetables and meat in.

At Imahan, you can pay them a considerable (but so very worth it!) sum and they'll bring you a multi-course meal that feels like a fireworks show of food, with the Sukiyaki course come near the end, as a crescendo of flavor that leaves you a little shell-shocked and overhelmed.  The sushi at the beginning is lovely and the other things are nice, but the pièce de résistance is the sukiyaki course itself, since the beef is Wagyu beef--a marbled delicacy of Japanese cuisine that cannot be bought for love or money, in most of the world.  The beef, as soon as it is cooked, is pulled out with chopsticks and dredged in the raw egg mixture in the individual bowls, then consumed while it's still warm and gooey and delicious.

Dinner was so good it was almost upsetting.  We rolled back to our ridiculous hotel happy and content, stuffed to the gills with food.

Little did I know the next place we were going was almost going to put this dinner to shame.

Tokyo Overdrive - Part I

You know, it's not often that I think to myself "I overdid it."

I overdo things all the time.  Ask anyone that knows me.  But the likelihood that I'll be self-aware enough to look back on something (especially something that went well!) and admit that maaaaybe I redlined the engines a little much. . .'eh, it's not something I do.

I initially tried to write the headline for this post as a bulleted list of what happened.  Just trying to write out all the things we did made me tired.

We began with breakfast.   The only way to describe this breakfast is "super-extra".  I only took one picture, but I will let this picture convey how extra this breakfast was.

This is how the breakfast buffet provided us with honey.

Yes, really.

Stuffed to the gills with food, we meandered (trundled might be more apt) down to the Imperial Palace grounds, so that we could walk through the gardens.   The Emperor of Japan's primary residence is the palace, so it's not open to the public, but there's a very nice public garden that hosts the ruins of a small fortress and a few guard houses that were used in former eras, plus a really cool building called the Tōkagakudō, which is basically a private music hall for the imperial family--they have private concerts there occasionally.

The grounds of the garden were beautiful, as you might imagine, full of brilliant choices that made the garden a joy to walk through even in winter.  The beautiful building with the copper roof is the Suwa no chaya teahouse.

The gardens were lovely and after taking our time meandering through them, we stopped for a warm drink on the way to Tokyo station.

Everybody talks about the vending machines here and how they're crazy and they sell everything.  And it's true that there are some pretty epic machines here that sell some weird items (I'll try to collect a few pictures when I'm back in Tokyo before I leave).

But really, the thing that has my brain most intrigued so far is just the normal Kirin vending machines.

Because they all sell both cold (blue prices) and warm (red prices) drinks.

And in the winter, it turns out, every time I see a vending machine, I will seriously consider grabbing a warm can of Tully coffee or Royal Milk Tea to drink and warm my hands with.  It's shocking how effective they are at drawing my attention now that I know they sell warm stuff.


Anyway.

Off we went next to Tokyo station.  Tokyo station was built at the height of the Meiji period, when Imperial Japan had decided that it was going to play the worlds largest version of "anything (they) can do we can do better!").  To that end, they were scrambling to build their brand new rail system out, and Tokyo station was built to act as a nexus for those new railway lines.  It's a beautiful building that faces the Imperial grounds down a long, spacious boulevard.

We ducked inside next, and caught a train to Shibuya to get some Ramen for lunch and see the scramble and the shopping district.