Day 26, in which we go too far to get to Osaka

We rose early, checked out of our hotel and took the train south to our next destination: Osaka. It turns out Osaka is less than half an hour away from Kyoto – one of the suburbs, in Tokyo terms – but fortunately we went to the wrong train station, travelling from Shin-Osaka (where the bullet train pulls in) to Osaka Station, then back to Shin-Osaka again when we realised that's where our hotel is, only to find our hotel wasn't ready for check-in so we dumped our bags and took the train back to Osaka Station again. This all helped to pass a very exciting morning.

In the afternoon we went to Kaiyukan, the Osaka Aquarium, whose stirring motto is “Ocean, You Meet Whale Shark”. We did indeed meet whale shark, as well as a range of dolphins, penguins, otters, turtles and fish. Kaiyukan (which is supposed to be the best aquarium in Japan) is divided into just thirteen separate tanks, each of which represents a different eco-system and spans up to five different floors. You start right at the top – watching, say, otters frolic on the beach – and then descend down, seeing the different strata of each eco-system, right down to the seabed where the bottom-feeders lurk.

Star of the show was the Pacific Ocean tank, the largest and most exciting, housing a large number of manta rays, school of mackerel, zebra sharks, hammer head sharks and the much-advertised whale shark. Just as lovely, in single-storey tanks 14 and 15a-c lived the creaking world of the long-legged spider crabs and the colourful and mysterious jellyfish.


We tried to eat in a Japanese fast food restaurant, but the maitre d' (if fast food joints have maitre'ds, otherwise the spotty wee girl standing at the front) insisted we write something down on her piece of paper, and since we didn't know what she expected us to write we just left and ate from KFC instead, as the Japanese for 'chicken fillet burger' is easy to remember (just say it as though you're a weak Italian stereotype: 'chickena filleta burgera').

We returned to Shin-Osaka to check into our hotel, the New Osaka Hotel Osaka, a charming hostelry constructed between two fly-overs and two separate train lines, which nevertheless contains four separate wedding chapels. Despite the opulence of the reception area, our room is the smallest yet. There is no real room for our luggage, and the only place to unpack clothes is a small drawer in the middle of the room and two coat hangers hanging on the mirror.

Shin-Osaka is in the northern part of the city and comes with little to recommend it, but we couldn't face another train trip into Osaka proper for dinner so we googled for nearby food and ended up at an Indian restaurant called Khazana. Although our food was okay, I wouldn't recommend eating here as the premises primarily served as the depot for a food delivery service. We waited for our meal under the watchful eye of a burly delivery man, who sat across the room from us smoking a cigarette. They also forgot to put any prawns in the prawn jalfrezi.

We went to bed and watched season one of Nighty Night, which was terrific even if it went a little far in the final episode.

Day 25, in which we have our fill of tofu in a bedroom of eels

Today we wandered down to Nishiki-koji, a food market spanning six or seven blocks which has served as a fish and vegetable market since the seventeenth century, but is now home to stalls selling a wide range of products, including waving-cat-tea-cozies, baby-octopuses-on-a-stick and a thousand variations on the ubiquitous pickled radish.

A narrow passageway between a fish stall and a china stall led us into Hale, a traditional vegan restaurant in a machiya. Machiya apparently means 'bedroom of eels', on account of the fact they are extremely long and narrow buildings, divided up into a series of rooms for fiscal reasons (in ancient times, the shogun taxed you according to the width of your house). We slipped off our shoes and padded across the tatami mats to sit on the floor at our low table. Paul is 6'1” and didn't fit under the table, while I kept clumsily banging the sliding screen behind me, and it all felt like we were adults playing in a Wendy house.

We had gone to Hale in the hope of getting some more vegetables, but it turns out Japanese vegan restaurants simply replace all of the animal products with tofu and soya, rather than supplementing any vegetables into the dish. Our vegan meal-deal thus comprised: a big bowl of white rice, topped with thinly sliced tofu and soya cream (and – I counted – two kidney beans); a small side-dish of salted creamy tofu; a miniature plate of crunchy pickled vegetables; and a small side-dish of sliced cabbage and carrot, so finely chopped it seemed almost pre-digested. Green tea and chillies were served alongside.

We left feeling rather nauseous, tofu slopping around in our bellies. We strolled south through the city to Kyoto Station where – after a brief visit to the Tezuka Osamu studio to stock up on Astro Boy manga merchandise – we explored The Cube, a brave new architectural development in a city whose architecture otherwise falls into two camps: the traditional wood and the unthinking concrete. The Cube is a huge shopping centre built into the side of the railway station, into which is cut a vast and continuous staircase (and series of escalators, thank goodness) rising over twelve floors to a Sky Garden on the roof, from which one can see spectacular views across Kyoto to the mountains.

We took the tube out east to follow the Philosopher's Walk. Apparently in the nineteenth century some university professor used to walk along the canal each day, and so they've named the walk after him (not a widespread tradition, otherwise my grandfather's daily walk along the nearby A-road would by now be known as the Asbestos Manufacturer's Walk). It turned out to be a fairly pretty walk in the foothills of the eastern mountains, following a quiet canal through a peaceful part of suburbia. The far end led into a rather hectic street lined with tatty souvenir stalls, serving the tourists attracted to yet another temple (the Silver Pavilion), so we turned in the opposite direction and continued our walk back into town, passing through the city proper. Kyoto is not an attractive city, but it was interesting to get off the temple tourist track and stroll through these suburban streets to see how people live their lives – playing baseball, walking their children to the temple or just hanging out the washing.

We drank a bottle of wine at our local, Merry Island, and then headed out to find dinner. When we first arrived in Kyoto we spent ages trying to locate on our map a recommended Indian restaurant called Mughal, without success, but coming out of Merry Island today we discovered it was directly next door. A superb meal of samosa in chilli sauce, tandoori prawns laced with clove, boiled egg curry and sag paneer – all mopped up with a naan – saw us happy to bed, where the evening movie was Ms Elizabeth Taylor's classic flick, Cleopatra.

Day 24, in which we are hurried through our spiritual contemplation

We had brunch in the Nishijin weaving district in the north of Kyoto, at a traditional Japanese bathhouse which has been converted into the fabulous café-restaurant Sarasa Nishijin. The café retains the wooden structure and all of the original tile work, and has added some very friendly waiters, great music and a lovely sausage salad and chicken broth meal deal.

We were up in Nishijin to visit the Daitoku-ji complex of temples, which are famous for their 'dry landscape' zen gardens. There are four separate temples to visit, but we showed great restraint in only visiting two before deciding we were sufficiently enlightened. The guidebook reports that zen gardens are aids to meditation and that one could spend entire days in contemplation of a single garden. This was particularly impossible at the Daisen-in temple, where an elderly curator pulled us round the various gardens, only leaving us alone for five minutes before sticking his head back round the corner to see what was taking us so long. “We is reaching a new spiritual plane, innit?” I wanted to shout at him.

Each zen garden was a different arrangement of raked gravel, stones and moss. They would make cute features in a courtyard or quiet corner of the garden, but I didn't buy into their spiritual significance. The interpretations attributed to them were spectacularly unimaginative: raked gravel was usually a river, any flat round stone was a turtle swimming in the river (a symbol of despair, of course) and any longer shaped rocks were usually a boat, typically symbolising a journey down the river (and therefore life). Any remaining rocks that didn't fit into this complex philosophy were interpreted as simply mountains, or were given names the same way one spots cloud formations in the sky: this rock looks a bit like a man humping a cantaloupe, or a beetle carrying a hairdryer, or is it a particularly long wasp?

At the most famous zen garden in the world (in Daisen-in) we thus found the river of life carrying a boat laden with a turtle (despair) and a stork (joy), and near to the mouth of the river (i.e. the point of death) was a sleeping cow (apparently this was to illustrate that even cows must struggle against the inevitability of their death, although as it was sleeping it doesn't seem Daisy was in this case struggling particularly hard). We also saw one of the smallest zen gardens in the world, at Ryogen-in, which had three rocks in a thin strip of gravel, two of them representing binary opposites (male/female, life/death, Mel/Kim) and the third rock completely ignored by this interpretation.

We skipped out of Daitoku-ji and high-tailed it on the tube down to Nijo-jo, a palace built as the Kyoto residence of the Shogun in 1603 in a direct challenge to the authority of the Emperor, but now housing Japan's largest collection of 'No Photograph' signs, as well as a selection of new 'No Sketching' signs not currently viewable anywhere else in the country. We were reaching cultural overload by this point - having seen endless temples and shrines and pagodas and gardens over the past ten days - and things were not helped by the tour information provided at Nijo-jo, which focussed on the 'National Treasures' we were seeing (elegant painted paper screens, wooden carvings, silk tapestries), but mentioned nothing about the purpose or historical significance of the building we were standing in. I came out knowing that Someone Very Important had once painted a tiger on a piece of silk many years ago, but not which room it was in or what political decisions it might have overseen. We also learned nothing about the structure of the building, which was arranged as a row of squares connected only by their north-west and south-east corners, with wide corridors flanking the external walls and the rooms protected by a wall of sliding doors on the inside. It was an odd way to built a palace, but they didn't think to say why.

The gardens were lovely, however, and are structured within two concentric moats, which I suppose the Shogun demanded as it leads to plenty of photo opportunities in front of pretty bridges. It also was here that we decided to go drink wine at the Ace Café at the top of Pontocho Alley. Pontocho is built on a land reclaimed from the river, and has a more friendly, individual Soho feel compared to the rest of Kyoto. The Ace Café is on the tenth floor and looks across the river to the eastern mountains, which glowed red as the sun set behind us and made a great complement to the white wine and Japanese indie music.

We had dinner at Bio-tei off Sanjo Dori, an organic vegan-friendly café in what feels like someone's kitchen. The vegan meal deal – tofu steak with tomato sauce – sounded pretty bland, so we decided to be vegan-unfriendly and had a selection of mackerel and salmon salads, tofu-dressed-vegetables and deep-fried tofu soup. Everything was delicious and the meal contained more salad and vegetables than we've eaten during the rest of our visit to Japan.

We strolled home happy, and watched Zooey Deschanel's new movie, Yes Man, featuring Jim Carrey. It was far, far better than I'd expected, and Mr Carrey only did his silly faces twice.

Day 23, in which we pass through 10,000 gates and meet 1,001 ladies each with 1,000 arms

After breakfast at a charming Starbucks overlooking the river, we visited the Fushimi Shrine to the east of Kyoto, a sort of Shinto version of Times Square where local and national companies erect giant red gates bearing their names, although the aim is to gain favour from the gods rather than raising brand awareness. The Fushimi Shrine is devoted to Inari - the god of rice - so it's hard to imagine why electronics manufacturers and fund managers are falling over themselves to pay tribute to him, but as it happens there are over ten thousand of these red gates snaking up the mountain through the forest, sometimes so densely packed you cannot see through to the trees outside.

A happy morning was spent exploring the different gated pathways leading up the mountainside, which branch off to visit different shrines and religious sites, most of which are guarded by Inari's messengers (who are all foxes, of course, usually wearing dashing red capes). There were spectacular views of Kyoto from the top of the mountain, and the city was revealed to carpet the entire plain, stretching off to the mountains to the far west in unbroken urban development. We got lost in our descent and ended up wandering through a bamboo plantation into an affluent part of Kyoto suburbia.

After a quick coffee, we trusted the guidebook rather too much by believing its reports of a "near hallucinatory effect" to be had at Sanjusangen-do Temple. Sanjusangen holds first prize in that most hotly-contested of competitions, "the longest wooden structure in the world", and also houses the largest number of statues of Kannon (the goddess of Mercy), a thousand of them all guarding one giant version of the same goddess. Why a goddess should be recruited multiple times to guard herself was not clear, but the effect was far from hallucinatory. Mundane in their uniformity might be a better way of putting it: once you've seen 200 near-identical statues of Kannon, you've pretty much seen them all. To complicate matters, Kannon has a thousand arms and so the sculptors had to produce over a million arms in total. If I were embarking on this exercise I would probably have had Kannon guarded by a thousand slugs - much easier, and you could do it with play-dough.

The south-east of Kyoto is home to a large number of temples and shrines, but after our Sanjusangen experience we decided to skip most of them, gorge ourselves on rice products and head straight for the Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which involves the usual giant red gates, pagodas, camp statues of thunder gods and cruelly contorted cedar trees, but is also halfway up the mountain and has great views of the city. Dusk was approaching by now, the sun resting just above the mountains in the distance, and it was well worth the climb uphill for the view alone.

Trotting home, we passed through the Gion District, which is the oldest and most traditional part of Kyoto, lying east of the river and thus untouched by the fires which typically destroyed the rest of the city at least every 200 years (there isn't a tourist attraction in the guidebook which wasn't at least partially rebuilt within the past century thanks to fire). The houses in Gion were typically Japanese constructions - all elegant bamboo supports, wooden frames and sliding paper doorways - but the Japanese are also typically very private people, and so we got to see little more than the streetside facade. When delicate geisha women slipped through their sliding doorways, the process was an elegant sleight-of-hand designed to prevent any prying eyes from seeing inside.

This is all far more culture than I would typically seek out when visiting a European city (I haven't been to a single museum, church or art gallery in Florence, for example), so to relax and recover we returned to the Happy Island for a bottle of wine and dinner. When we had lunch here yesterday it was 3pm and the place was deserted, but the decor and staff were so lovely we decided it would be good to see it in the evening, bustling with customers and full of atmosphere. Well, we sat there all night drinking wine and eating dinner and the only other customers to enter the building were two grumpy old men who each smoked a cigarette before leaving again. I suspect we might be in Kyoto out of season.

We had an excellent aubergine lasagne - which is an interesting take on Asian fusion - before returning to the room to watch Sir Matt Damon's super new film, the Bourne Ultimatum.

Day 22, in which a badger greets us with its swollen testicles

Today we checked out of the Chisun Inn and travelled to Tokyo Station to cash in on our JR Passes. These glittering pieces of card give us unlimited train travel for the next fortnight, and we hope to put them to good use.

Our first trip was on the shinkansen bullet train down to Kyoto. The train pulled up at Tokyo Station (its terminus) to be met by an army of cleaners – the men in powder blue, the ladies in baby pink – which boarded each carriage simultaneously and swept through the entire train in minutes, gathering rubbish, wiping every table and pivoting the chairs around to face forward for the return journey. Inside, the train was spacious and comfortable, and when we later pulled up at Kyoto Station both of us were surprised to discover we'd been travelling for almost three hours.

We passed quite close to Mount Fuji during the journey, and we'd both been excited to see it covered in snow. Our excitement grew as we passed large fields covered in deep, deep snow, but it was only when we arrived in Kyoto and were greeted by little flurries of snowflakes that we realised the terrible implication: Kyoto is absolutely baltic. Later in the day I bought a scarf, and I still have ambitions to acquire a hat.

We checked into the Hearton Hotel – which was chosen largely on the basis of price, but turns out to be fairly centrally located, with rooms larger and more pleasant than the Chisun Inn and bedsheets that don't bring on an allergic reaction – and headed out to find lunch down by the riverside. We ended up at Merry Island, an Asian fusion café-restaurant which only served two dishes. We both had the superb shrimp and scallop yellow curry.

We strolled along the riverside, which is very much less spoiled than that of Tokyo, and headed into the east of the city where a larger proportion of traditional architecture remains, mostly comprising elegant two-storey wooden houses arranged along narrow alleys. Some of the houses had statues of badgers outside them, with giant distended testicles, due to the fact one of Kyoto's shinto temples is devoted to the animal, whose testes are believed to have magical powers.

We both agreed that Kyoto is a much more pleasant city to be in than Tokyo, in part because there is a greater sense of space (with the whole city bounded on three sides by beautiful mountains), and also because the people seem both happier and more relaxed. We'd planned to spend a while wandering the streets and taking in the atmosphere, but it got dark early and was very cold so we ended up in the Pig & Whistle, a reproduction of a British pub complete with beers on draft, a large area devoted to darts, and fish & chips on the menu. The Pig & Whistle was more authentically traditional than most in the UK these days, as smoking is still permitted indoors in Japan so we sat supping our bitter in a light haze of cigarette smoke and it was almost like being in my 20s again.

For dinner we went to Ashoka, the type of Indian restaurant that was traditional in England in the 1980s, and then to bed.

Day 21, in which Elizabeth Taylor gets drunk and screams in the garden

After a week of straight sunshine, we opened the curtains to find it pouring with rain. It was difficult, then, to carry out our plans of taking a day trip to one of Hakone, Yokohama or Kamakura. Instead we slept.

For Late Brunch (or 'Lunch', as it can be abbreviated), we made a second trip to the sushi belts of Maguro Bito – enjoying a largely new range of fishy treats, most of which did not involve sea urchin ovaries – before returning to our room to watch Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor battle it out in the superb Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burton played an erudite, dissatisfied alcoholic who despises his wife, while Taylor played a drunken adulterer who despises her husband. From what I hear, they were not playing against type.

In the evening we trekked out to Yoyogi, where Tokyo's finest Cambodian restaurant Angkor Wat lives. Still marginally depressed by Japan's obsession with austerity cooking (last night, for example, we watched a cookery show in which the smiling chef took 20 minutes to demonstrate how to prepare the speciality of large daikon radish chopped into quarters and smeared in vinegar), Cambodian food came as a wonderful surprise: fresh varied salads drenched in tasty light dressings and chilli peppers; moist hot skewers of beef served with spicy relish; soft and succulent summer rolls; tasty and rich coconut ice-cream; and other very much non-Japanese treats. The Japanese like to keep rice pure during their meals, and nothing could better illustrate how different Cambodian cooking is than the fried rice served at the end of our meal: a mound of sea food, diced pork, spring onions, peppers and chilli, held together by the rice and the whole flavoured with a spicy dressing. I'm very much looking forward to visiting Cambodia in March.

While we were eating, I secretly thought how much Papa, the owner of Angkor Wat, reminded me of Paul's dad, but I didn't like to say anything. About ten minutes later Paul brought it up himself, and we agreed Papa was his Cambodian doppelgänger. We felt very much at home after that.

Day 20, in which we meet a bright yellow bird in a nappy

After breakfast we decided to finally visit Senso-ji Temple, just up the road from our hotel, which the guidebook describes as “Tokyo's most sacred and spectacular temple”. It turned out today is a public holiday and the place was swarming with locals dressed up in colourful traditional costumes, including cumbersome wooden shoes which no-one seemed to know how to walk in properly (picture a wooden flip-flop glued on top of a child's alphabet building block). The temple itself is reached via a long red arcade of stalls selling tourist tat – packed densely with people trying to buy sticks of yakatori, postcards of Mount Fuji or Pokemon characters – but today the temple itself was sheathed in scaffolding and plastic wrapping and we didn't like to intrude.

We walked to Ueno and took the train to Komagome to see the Rikugi-en stroll garden, which was built by a Japanese playboy in the seventeenth century and supposedly recreates 88 miniature landscapes, each the subject of a separate 33-line poem. Unfamiliar with these poems we just enjoyed the very unnatural recreations of nature, with trees so carefully pruned and twisted to meet the Japanese concept of perfection that limbs which hang too low were propped up on stilts, while limbs that were too high were weighed down with ropes and anchors. In a couple of very extreme examples cedar trees were lost under the elegant rigging that was keeping them in shape, beautiful webs of rope with a living tree at their core.

We had a long and large lunch at a superb tapas restaurant – where I discovered just how much I missed flavours such as fresh olive oil, chili and garlic – before returning to Asakusa and crossing the river to view Philip Starck's Super Dry building. Known locally as the 'Gilded Turd', it's hard to imagine what else Starck might have meant it to be.

Travelling home from Nikko the other day, Paul mentioned that he was obsessed with sumo wrestling on Channel 4 as a child. Oddly, it hadn't until that point occurred to him to see whether or not it was possible to see a sumo match while we were in Japan. Fortunately for us, it turned out that the National Sumo Tournament was due to start the following day, and so today – day two of the games – we found ourselves trotting into the National Sumo Stadium.

I had never watched sumo as a child and so had no idea what to expect. It turns out the wrestling started as part of the harvest celebrations, and so is closely associated with Shinto, the pagan religion which pre-dates Buddhism in Japan, and largely continues to live alongside it. Every sumo wrestler in the country fights on every day of the tournament, but the actual wrestling still takes much less time than the various Shinto rituals surrounding them: the gyoji chanting out a prayer and waving his fan, the bowing and drinking of sake, the tossing of salt to purify the ring, etc. When two sumo wrestlers actually come together, it takes about ten seconds for one of them to either fall to the ground or be thrown from the ring. Sometimes this was rather drab – a stray hand hitting the sand, for example – and other times it was spectacular, such as when a 30 stone man was hurled out of the ring and into the audience, crashing into a tiny old Japanese lady watching from the ringside. I thought perhaps she might require an ambulance, but instead she was all smiles. I think some women might shell out for the expensive ringside seats just to cop a feel of their heroes.

All told, we watched three hours of sumo and I remained interested and enthusiastic throughout, which is more than can be said for the football, cricket or any other sporting matches I've endured in the past.

We ticked another box in our I Spy Japanese Cuisine book in the evening by visiting Denny's, a Japanese variant of the American chain which specialises in yoshoku, or 'western food'. Despite its name, yoshoku is nothing like what we eat in the west, having been adopted over a century ago and corrupted since. My meal was a rather disgusting pork burger doused in a bland brown gravy served with five chips and a battered prawn, while Paul had a burger topped with a mound of spring onions, a pile of drained tin corn and some KFC-style chicken.

Day 19, in which we see a dog with a very clean bottom

Sunday is a day of rest, so I relaxed in the hotel with a book while Paul went for a walk along the apparently barren and industrial riverside, before scooting over to Ebisu to visit an exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

We met up again for a bento box lunch in Ueno Park. I'd heard good thinks about Ueno, but I guess everyone else had visited it outside of winter, when the endless rows of trees would be covered in spring green, summer blossom or autumnal browns. As it was, in winter we had row upon row of brown twigs, and nothing to distract us from the fact that the park is almost entirely concreted over with roads, pavements and squares. It was reminiscent of a very large and relatively pretty car park, but I suppose it makes life easier for the poor schmoes who have to sweep up all the blossom and autumnal leaves each year.

Kbo told me Ueno Park was rather like Hyde Park, and I suppose for all its concrete this makes sense as it appears to be a park where people go to be seen and to promenade. We saw some relatively unusual people during our brief time in the park, including a collection of Teddy Boys standing by the pond listening to very, very quiet rock and roll; a happy man in his mid-30s strolling with a large grey rabbit perched on his shoulder (and a special portable rabbit hutch on his back, for when Bunny got shy); and a woman whose pug dog fouled the pavement, and not only did she clean up the mess but then surgically removed a wet wipe from her hand bag and carefully polished its arsehole.

At the north end of the park sits a series of exhibition halls and museums which fly under the flag of the Tokyo National Museum. Their Asian Collection (sitting in a classical building to the left) was a rather small and drab set of broken pots, spiced up only by a couple of Cambodian statues and a superb series of artefacts sourced from (an apparently Asian) Egypt. The main museum – which is built in the traditional Japanese style – smelled so bad we had to leave almost immediately upon entering, so we went instead to the archaeological pavilion at the rear of the complex, where there was a fine collection of idiotic terracotta figurines.

As night was already falling, we strolled down through the park and south to Akihabara – the so-called Electric Town – to see the chaotic clusters of neon signs that mark out this region (although in truth, you get large amounts of neon pretty much throughout the city). Akihabara was heaving with people, in contrast to the rest of Tokyo which is generally much more civilised, and we were glad to come out the other end and get some space.

We continued our stroll down to Tokyo Station (passing on route the Nihonbashi Bridge, an historic bronze bridge which formally marks the centre of the city, but which is now almost completely forgotten, buried as it is directly below a double-flyover which snakes its way directly over the river). For dinner we had dhosa and curry at Dhaba India near the station, and while the quality of the meat was disappointing our taste buds were eternally thankful for some much needed stimulation.


Cultural Aside #002: A lot of Japanese etiquette concerns hygiene and the avoidance of disease, with the guide book advising that it is socially unacceptable to blow your nose in public, and many people in the city wearing gauze masks to either contain their own disease or to avoid contracting someone else's. Despite this, I've been surprised to see that it is completely acceptable to cough without covering the mouth – even when they're standing directly over me on the tube, and usually with a heavy focus on moving phlegm – while Japanese men (I cannot speak for the women) do not wash their hands after using the toilet. This is not just a matter of personal preference – in 90% of toilets there is no soap to wash your hands (including museums, public transport and – more worryingly, restaurants, where chefs are at work with food I will eat), and in all but a handful of cases there is no means to dry your hands, presumably making the assumption that you won't wash them in the first place. All I can say is, thank goodness Paul packed several litres of hand sanitiser to get us through the holiday.

Day 18, in which we visit the mausoleum of Richard Chamberlain

Today we took the train north to Nikko to see the World Heritage complex of Buddhist shrines and temples, which are nestled at the top of a hill within a thick forest of pine trees. I hadn't really heard of Nikko so didn't know what to expect, and so while the well-informed tourists rushed from carvings of sleeping cats to frescoes of wise monkeys to paintings of roaring dragons, we happily ambled around taking everything in, from the sheer scale of the buildings to the tiny carvings that gilded their sides.

First was Rinno-ji Sanbatsu, where three giant golden gods were hiding round the back, all the more amazing for being 1,244 years old, although the thousand-armed goddess of mercy was probably a few hundred arms short. We then entered the shrine complex of Tosho-gu which is probably the most famous and (in modern terms) Tomb Raidery, built on several levels up into the hillside and festooned with ancient pine trees. We found about a billion things to take photographs of here, and despite the influx of tourists it was a very pleasant place to be.

I still don't know much about Buddhist traditions, and while trying to enter one room to see the roaring dragon it turned out I was taking my shoes off in the wrong place, next to the 'please remove your shoes' sign. I don't think much of any religion whose main tenet is that you take off your shoes before you reach the sign telling you to take off your shoes. The roaring dragon was also a disappointment; the guidebook reported that a priest would clap his hands to demonstrate how the dragon could roar. From the spectacle that took place, I conclude that dragons briefly roar by gurgling quietly in a high-pitched echo.

After the stunning complex of Tosho-gu, it was perhaps a shame we next came to Futarasan shrine, such was the contrast: on the one hand, a series of immaculate buildings anointed with spectacular carvings; on the other: a couple of lean-to buildings with a spinning plate of plastic cakes, and a hoopla game made from rope.

As we approached the last of the temples – Rinno-ji Taiyuin – Paul read from the guidebook that it contains the mausoleum of the third Shogun. “What's a Shogun?” I wondered out loud. “Shogun was a television mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain,” Paul explained patiently, hiding his disgust at my ignorance.

On the way back to the railway station we passed Nikko's most famous landmark, the red lacquered Shin-kyo bridge, which legend has it marks the site where the Buddhist priest Shado Shonin crossed the river with the assistance of two generous snakes. Although a major tourist attraction, it turns out the bridge is now absolutely surrounded by modern roads and traffic and there is only one nice angle from which it can be photographed (needless to say, the angle used all of the guidebooks - whose side are they on?):

Although you can pay to go on the bridge (we did not), you only get to walk on a scaffold walkway built on top of the bridge and cannot anyway exit at the other side. The guidebook also reports that the original bridge was recently destroyed, and so the bridge is only a 2005 reconstruction (complete with steel supports). This was a slight disappointment.

We took the train home to Asakusa for dinner. After searching in vain for a recommended tempura restaurant opposite the Dembo-in shrine, we ended up at one on the seventh floor of the nearby Matsuya Department store. The Japanese seem to be very fond of carbohydrates, as several tempura options came in a set meal with separate bowls of white rice, udon noodles, wheat noodles and teppan noodles. This is possibly more side dishes than one requires. We opted for a simple tempura, served only with rice and teppan noodles.

There is a traditional conversation-starter where friends ask which cuisine you would happily only eat for the rest of your life, and I've always thought fondly of sushi, sashimi and noodles and gone for Japanese. This evening, however, we decided that we may already be reaching the point where just a little bit of non-Japanese food each day will help refine our appetites. Lovely as their simple approach to cooking is, most meals use the same set of ingredients: umami-rich miso and soy sauce, spring onions, pickled vegetables and the ubiquitous bowl of rice. It tends to prove rather samey, involves very few vegetables and also a poor balance between protein and refined white carbs. Tomorrow we'll try something western and I really won't miss the rice.

Day 17, in which only elementary school children may ride the cat bus

We rose early and took the train west to Mitaka to visit the Ghibli Museum, an institution established by Studio Ghibli's founder and primary animator Hayao Miyazaki. The blurb had a lot to say about Miyazaki's vision of the ideal museum: that it should be unpretentious, should be explicable to even those unfamiliar with the studio's work, that it should both entertain and enlighten, blah, blah and blah. I'm not sure how many of these boxes it ticked, but we certainly approached it on the assumption it would have more to say about good curating than it would about the Studio Ghibli films (of which Paul has seen none).

On the whole, the museum is a bit of a failure and its blurb is significantly overblown. Its primary success is the building itself, which was designed by the Ghibli animators (people who have created some of the best imaginary buildings on film) and which imitated a large Edwardian mansion. The central hall rose up through four stories, overseen by landings, balconies, criss-crossing walkways, half-height doorways and oddly-shaped windows at different levels, with a caged metal staircase rising in one corner and old-fashioned lift in the other, all designed to create the impression that there was an endless maze of passageways and rooms to explore. The attention to detail was also impressive, with stylised scenes from their movies painted on ceilings, and a spectacularly successful series of stained glass windows telling the legend of Totoro as though it were the seven stages of the cross.

Our favourite room was the cinema, where they showed a specially commissioned Ghibli movie (about an elderly Japanese couple who sought refuge from their mundane farming existence by supporting the sumo-wrestling ambitions of the mice which infested their house – a film only viewable at the museum, the blurb boasted, although I found you could also buy the DVD in the gift shop).

Where the museum failed was absolutely everything else: a third of the rooms in the building were given over to toilets (so much so that when Paul and I took up the invitation to explore the museum and make our own story, we slipped through a miniature door in one wall and ten seconds later found ourselves in the ladies' loos – not entirely a wasted voyage, for we learned that Japanese women use urinals), while the exhibition spaces were quite lazily conceived, comprising as they did lots of original art work from the movies surrounded by large amounts of junk (ash trays, model aeroplanes, books about Scotland) which were not related to the films, but were intended to “inspire the imagination”. We were not suitably inspired, and were instead disappointed that the museum had little to say about what inspired Miyazaki or the actual process of animation at the studio.

There were two other things to excite me: on the top floor, in the far south-west corner, was a life-size cat bus to play on (elementary school children only, alas), while in the first room on the ground floor was a 3D zoetrope: a series of spinning models revolving at the same frequency as a flashing strobe light, creating the impression of 3D animation. The cat bus prowled, Totoro jumped up and down with his umbrella, that wee girl did some skipping and a whole host of rabbits gambolled in between the various characters. Given Studio Ghibli's strong reputation for innovation, this was precisely the sort of thing I had expected to fill the museum.

We left and ate a variety of baked goods outside the station, before taking the train to Tokyo Station and embarking on an architectural tour of Ginza. Thus we saw Tokyo Station itself (a great century-old red brick construction, much neglected but now under restoration) and the superb Tokyo Internationl Forum down the road (a huge upturned boat-shaped atrium made from vast quantities of steel and earthquake-resistant glass). We also tried to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel – known once upon a time as the 'Jewel of the Orient' – but it seems they tore that down in the 1960s to make way for a large concrete box filled with bad carpeting and seedy looking businessmen. A bit of detective work led us to a surviving pillar in the rear lobby and some carved volcanic rock by the bank of elevators from the original facade, as well as a single photograph of how the old hotel had looked. We had until this point been sad that such a great work had been lost, but seeing this photograph disabused us of any such notion. Wright – readers may recall – is very famous for his series of prairie houses, which are inspired to a great extent by traditional domestic Japanese architecture. So what did Wright use as his inspiration when building the Imperial? Why, the Aztecs of course! It was utterly hideous, and if they hadn't pulled it down in the 1960s I'd have signed a petition today requesting that they do so now.

We went for a quick drink in the hotel's Old Imperial Bar – which was supposedly inspired by the original Wright design – but it was a dark and oppressive 1970s-style room populated largely by Japanese businessmen talking business, ignoring their wives, smoking, and drinking whisky. The bar was ultimately reminiscent of Wright only to the extent that they used his name a lot in the drinks menu, and since it was also £10 a glass of very bad sancerre we soon called it a day.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the launch of Sony's new 3D television, so while in the Ginza area we popped into the Sony showroom to have a quick look. Readers with long memories might recall that I am no great fan of 3D cinema, but it was impressive to see the effect pulled off on a single high definition screen. The movie we watched involved a polar bear's bottom looming into the room, and I can think of no better use for 3D technology.

For dinner, we went to Sometaro in Asakusa, our first traditional Japanese restaurant (where you have to take off your shoes at the door and place them into a traditional Japanese plastic carrier bag, and then sit on a cushion on the floor coz they've made the tables too low) to eat Okonomi-yaki. Okonomi-yaki are persistently described in English as 'Japanese pancakes', but as with the ones you get in London they're pretty much just thick (and slightly doughy) omelets. Unlike the restaurant we've been to in London, here we got to make them ourselves and so while we didn't much enjoy eating them it was super fun greasing up the hotplate, frying up the food and mixing in the various condiments. Fortunately we only ordered two – not three as the guidebook had suggested – as Paul later reported that if he'd had to eat any more he would have vomited onto the hot plate (not, I suppose, that anyone would have been able to tell the difference by looking).

The following morning Paul commented that the Okonomi-yaki weren't so bad. "At least we didn't vomit or have the shits," he mused.


NB: photos now restored to the rest of the blog, thanks to our friends at Photobucket