With thanks to mejh for the photo

Coming to a service station near you soon (possibly), it’s the 24hr Hot Menu (from frozen) vending machine. These are popping up all over Japan, so it may not be long before you spot one in the UK. You might see two machines alongside each other – this one for “casual frozen foods” and another one for formal chilled foods – a cornish pasty dressed in a tuxedo, for example.

So, who would use this sort of service?

Picture the scene… you’ve just crawled out of the local night club at 2am and are desperately craving some meat (as are the two hookers leaning on the lamppost across the street). The local kebab shop was fire-bombed last week and the only place open to you is the local service station. However, because you live in the roughest location in the entire world, they are not allowing people into the shop area; choosing instead to serve customers petrol and small snacks whilst cowering behind a screen of 12-inch-thick bullet-proof glass. If only there was a quick and simple way of getting some hot, fast food…

Your luck is in, as they’ve just installed a new vending machine on the forecourt that allows you to buy a hot meal. You approach the machine and stand there, swaying, whilst trying to focus on what each meal photograph is supposed to represent. One is shaped a bit like a fish and another looks like a pair of battered testicles. One thing is for certain – they all seem to come with chips. So, you opt for the cheapest one (sparrow and fries). Now then, where’s the vending machine for the condiments…?

Would you eat anything from one of these machines?

“If I was to punch that rich looking guy, would he sue me?” That was the question I put to my brother whilst we were walking around our Onsen Hotel in Kotohira, Japan. His response was quick: “No, he’d probably apologise for walking into your fist.”

It’s funny, but it does actually make an interesting point about how friendly Japanese people are. My brother is right – the man would probably stand there and apologise and bow profusely. To get him to stop bowing, I’d probably have to punch him again… harder… somewhere in the chest cavity… with some knuckle dusters…

At times it seemed quite bizarre to me, as a Westerner (oh no, I used *that* word). Walk in or out of a hotel, restaurant, shop or cafe and you will find the staff thanking you, bowing, smiling – sincerely happy to see you (but not glad to see you leave). Yes, it’s nice but come on – I should be thanking you for my nice meal or service or for allowing me to look around your lovely shop. I feel like giving them a violent shake – no, not a liquid refreshment made of milk. What does a violent milkshake look like anyway, for goodness sake? Is it served with a machete instead of a straw?

Anyway, back to my point – what a difference this kind of service makes from the brand outlets in the UK, where they serve you in a shop, mumble the price, wipe their nose on their sleeve (well, at least it’s not your sleeve) and then stare at you as if to say “go on then, I’ve done my bit, you can put it in a bag yourself.” I want to be served my spinach doughnuts with a smile, not with a snarl and a fart from Mr ASBO.

Now, onto another point about service. When you’re out somewhere (a bit of a non-specific statement, I know) and a Japanese person goes above and beyond for you (like cleaning your windscreen in the petrol station), they don’t expect a tip for it. It’s all part of the service. Go to give the man a tip and he wont know what to do with it.

Question: when is green not green, but actually blue? Hint: It’s nothing to do with a convention of colourblind frogs. Answer: At Japanese road crossings and street lights. Yes, despite the light being as green as a mouldy apple jelly baby sitting on a plate of cress in Cafe Vert (note to self: don’t go there for the ‘dish of the day!’) , the light is blue blue and it’s a blue man, not a green one.

Whilst on the subject of the green (or blue) man, I found it highly entertaining to watch Japanese people at crossings. In Japan, the ‘stop, look, listen’ rule has been replaced with ‘stop…. stare at blue man…. hope….’ Despite the fact that a car hasn’t been spotted in either direction for months, they stand there… waiting for the blue man and the inevitable muzac (probably the tune of The Proclaimers ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles… But There’s A Red Man Stopping Me’). I was told that it is considered shameful to cross when the red man is showing. So, people wait… and wait… and then suddenly one man thinks ‘sod it, I’m going to be late for my chiropodist’ and goes to cross. Like wildebeest waiting to cross a crocodile-infested river; once one goes, suddenly they all go. It’s obviously less shameful to cross on the red man once someone else has done it. There’s comfort in being shamed as a group… just ask X-Factor singing duo ‘John and Edward’.

On to Japanese women now (about time too!). One thing I admire greatly about Japanese women is their effort in wearing short skirts and shorts in any weather. Amazing…. ok, enough admiring!

Oh, and whilst it comes to the opposite sex, I found out that in Japanese, the words for ‘hot‘ and ‘thick‘ are the same. As are ‘tall‘ and ‘expensive‘. So, next time you hear your Japanese friend saying that she has met a tall, hot man… you might want to think twice before seeking an introduction and asking if they have any similar friends.

So, why do such a high percentage of men find Japanese women so attractive (apart from the way that they dress?). Well, I have a theory, and it’s all about pupil dilation. It has been scientifically proven that people become more attractive when their pupils dilate – it’s a sign that someone is attracted to you (or that someone is incredibly drunk). With Japanese women, their eyes tend to be very dark, which makes it seem as if their pupils are dilated (or they’re hammered!). So, if you’re not gazing at their legs, you’re gazing into their eyes. Well, that’s what I find, anyway. I mean, check out the image below. Her eyes…. are amazing.

Having just returned from Japan, I can appreciate how well the Japanese use their creativity in inventing ways of maximising the small amounts of space that they have. You may remember that I blogged about the vertical car parks, where people park their car inside a lift and the mechanism takes it upwards and stores it in a tower (it also turns the car around for you when it brings it back down). Well, they have invented a similar system for the storage of bikes, which was previously a big problem in urban areas. So, I give you, the Tokyo Bike Tree…

(The full blog article about it is available on the Guardian website.)

This will be my last blog from within Japan. I still have a few experiences to blog about (Japanese Archery, Onsens, funny photos and my overall reflections of a great experience), which I will do from back home. I am sitting here typing this blog post in a hotel just outside Narita Airport. I’ve had my last Japanese meal. Not wanting to go out with a whimper, I made sure I ate something a bit usual – shark fin roll – to go along with my noodles. Early in the morning, I leave for the airport.

So, what will happen tomorrow? Will the fortune given to me by the ‘wooden lion dancing robot mask thing’ come true? There is actually a little update on this story. I now have two things in my favour, to counteract the bowing wooden lion’s fortune of “something bad will happen on your way home“:

1) Two days ago we visited a burger shop in Kobe and Sayaka was given a ‘fortune stirrer’ (honestly, what next? Fortune pants?) to go with her coffee. The message on the stirrer was exactly this: “he might be wrong.”

2) Fearing my bad fortune might come true, Sayaka bought me a tiny frog, which is supposed to be a good luck charm. Frogs obviously out-trump dragons in the same way that rock beats scissors (I’m not going to go into the ‘paper beats rock’ point right now). The frog is pictured below. Will it work or won’t it? In the words of the Channel 4 Japanese Show, Banzai, – “place your bets…”

The tiny Japanese frog

After beginning the day trying out the massage chair in the hotel (photograph 1), which managed to pummel my back into seventeen pieces and squeeze my feet so hard that the toes almost merged together (hey, cool – webbed feet), we left Kotohira to travel to Kobe the fifth largest city in Japan.

This blog post is going to be short and sweet and is all about… Donkey Hote – a Japanese store, with five floors, that sells just about anything you could desire, from thongs to bicycles and everything in between. No, I don’t just mean tracksuit bottoms, I wasn’t talking literally. Besides, who wears a thong when riding a bike… What’s that? You do?!?

Photograph 2 shows a snap that I took in the store and the other photographs show some of the bizarre things within the store. Photograph 3, for example, is of a bum (and thong) pillow… before you ask, the bicycles were on the next floor up!

Photograph 5 is of a golf club umbrella (genius!). Now, there are two ways of looking at this. You could be out on the golf course playing golf, on the fourth hole, with your plastic club (you’ll probably be there for some time, looking at the quality of it) and you find it suddenly starts to rain (not too hard, obviously: it wouldn’t help you much in a monsoon). “Ha”, you shout to your opponents (loudly, as they are already in the club house, getting drunk) “I’ve got an umbrella… I won’t be getting wet!” Alternatively, you may go out in a rain shower one day and find the sudden need to chip a ball-shaped-object out of a patch of rough…

In the spirit of Christmas (hmmm), my final photograph for today (photograph 5) is of a pink Christmas tree. Who could resist? Ok… you can all put your hands down now. It was a rhetorical question!

Tomorrow I leave on the first part of my journey home. I still have much to reflect and report on. Sayonara for now though.

I took some photographs of the second Japanese Onsen that we visited during my time in Japan, so that you can get an idea of what they look like and how they are set up. Don’t worry, there are no naked bodies in the photographs anywhere.

If you remember from my previous blog post, Onsens are hot springs and are the old, traditional method that Japanese people used for bathing. However, the ones that we visited during my trip were more set up for attracting tourism.

When I entered this particular Japanese Onsen hotel, I dispensed with my shoes and Superman socks and plunged my feet into a pair of undersized, feminine looking slippers. It got me wondering: do all Japanese people have small feet? I found myself strutting around the place like a drunk transvestite. Thankfully, we left our slippers outside before we entered the spa bath area, so no danger of stumbling into a naked Japanese man. Once inside, we removed all clothing, grabbed a towel and flannel (and camera) and entered the spa bath area to quickly shower before jumping into the baths.

As I mentioned previously, men go into different spa baths than women. Damn them for spoiling the fun! We had an indoor (photo 1) and an outdoor (photo 2) spa bath. Notice, in photograph 3, how they even cater for kids by providing smaller stools.

Today’s journey took us to the little town of Kotohira. Tonight, we are yet again staying in a Japanese Onsen Hotel. However, this one is considerably more up-market than last night’s one. Here I am, for example, sitting in the lounge, listening to jazz and drinking beer by the fire, whilst I write this blog.

Tonight’s blog post is about the sashami and udon that we consumed this evening. Our hotel booking included a “small dinner”, so we all went out to have udon beforehand. Udon is a type of thick wheat-flour noodle – thicker and chewier than normal noodles. Although it took a bit more effort to munch my way through, I actually found I preferred it to normal noodles. Just as Nagano is said to be the Soba capital of Japan, so Kotohira is the udon capital of Japan. Photograph 1 shows this evening’s udon dish – noodles with meat.

It was only after I had eaten my bowl of noodles, and began feeling quite full, that Mark announced that we had to get back to the hotel quickly to “be ready for dinner.” Dinner? What dinner? He explained about how we had a small dinner to eat, not the full dinner but a “half-version.”

After arriving back, we went straight into the dining room. Course after course came and went from the table – 5 courses in total in an hour and a half. By the end of it, I needed a wheelbarrow to carry me out. Courses included sashami dishes such as jellyfish, sea urchin (photo 7), ‘tiny fish with bloody big eye’ (I named that one myself) and turban shell (photo 5), which I likened to chewing on my own index finger. Photographs 2 to 7 are of the sashami courses. There was one moment during dinner where I almost choked on my halibut – Sayaka was talking about one of the fishes on the plate and suddenly blurted out “bastard founder” whilst the waiter was standing there serving us drink. Goodness only knows what he thought of that (the fish is called ‘bastard flounder’, by the way). I’m told, by the way, that the difference between sashami and sushi is that sashami is raw fish by itself (i.e. no rice).

Straight after the sashami, came the meat course (photograph 8). By now I was feeling as full as an alcoholic’s fridge. The beef was sliced and we had a little cooker, with a candle underneath, on which to cook the beef. I have to say that it was the best beef I’ve ever eaten. Absolutely delicious and flavoursome. To wash it down: plum sake – amazing flavour.

There was one more course before dessert – a soup dish (photograph 9), which I decided not to have as I was ready to explode. Then came the dessert (photograph 10) – a sweet cream cheese roll (a bit like swiss roll) with some kiwi on the top. A delicious end to the meal.

I’m just posting some of the night photographs that I took of Kyoto Station, and surrounding area, during our visit there a few days ago. The station itself was impressive on its own. But, it was surrounded by other fantastic pieces of architecture, such as the Kyoto Tower. Inside the station, the Christmas tree was especially magical – with Christmas music timed together with the lights on the tree. Crowds gathered on the steps, opposite the tree, to watch it.

Enjoy the photographs… (the first one is a typical ‘Ally’ night shot)

After leaving Osaka, we travelled through Himeji to an Onsen Hotel in Akaho. This was the first Onsen Hotel of two that we are staying at.

We had planned to go to the famous Himeji Castle during the day, yesterday, on our way to Akaho. But it was raining Japanese cats and dogs, so it wasn’t really a viable option. However, the weather cleared up later on to give a lovely sunset on the final part of our drive to the hotel.

The Onsen Hotels really take you away from all of the stresses of life. When you arrive, you immediately give them your shoes and change clothes into a Yukata (it reminded me a lot of my old karate suit, but in a nicer colour). With the sun setting, we hot footed it into the Onsen spa bath. At first, for someone so used to the Western way of doing things, it was quite daunting taking off all of my clothes and revealing all my ‘little foibles’ (I’ll let you make your own funny joke out of that one) to other men. Having said that, the nighttime spa bath was empty. Oh, I should explain something: there are two different spa areas, one for men and one for women and they swap them over during the day, so that people can enjoy both. The night one was a nice, warm temperature.

A little bit about the tradition of the Onsen now: It is the old, traditional method that Japanese people once used for bathing. Due to the fact that Japan is a volcanically active country, Japanese people harnessed the heat in the ground to warm the water for their baths, bathing together in one area. These days, they are more of a tourist attraction. According to Wikipedia, “Japanese often talk of the virtues of ‘naked communion’ for breaking down barriers and getting to know people in the relaxed homey atmosphere.” So, there you go, if you want to break down barriers with someone, go for some naked communion (just try not to stare at their little foibles!).

After our night time dip in the Onsen, we went for dinner and were presented with an amazing looking feast. We ate many courses from crab to salmon, fish eggs, rice, noodles and more. I’ve never eaten crab brain before. Now, I have. Apparently it helps improve intelligence (there seems to be a bit of a theme going that doing something weird helps your intelligence. I’m wondering whether it just emphasises your gullibility instead!) Photographs 5 and 6 are of us and our food.

After spending the night sleeping on our futons on the floor, we awoke and headed down for breakfast (photograph 7). It was a traditional Japanese breakfast containing fish, soup, rice and vegetables (no crab brain this time). After breakfast, it was back to the spa baths. The second one was a LOT hotter than the first – I felt a bit like I was sitting in the soup that I had been drinking for breakfast.

Overall, it’s taken me a little bit out of my comfort zone. But, I’ve really enjoyed it. On to the next…

This morning we ate breakfast in the hotel and I was pleasantly surprised to find a spread that included some nice looking fruit (photograph 1).

Tell me: why is that we, as humans, feel the need to saunter into a breakfast room, walk up to a table and move a chair about 2 inches before we go up and start drooling over the breakfast delights? I guess it is a form of staking ownership on territory. In the animal kingdom, of course, an animal will mark its territory by urinating around the edge of it – something that I think the restaurant manager, this morning, would undoubtedly have frowned upon.

Whilst teaching Sayaka some important English phrases, such as “shut your cakehole“, I tucked into what I named my ‘half-English breakfast’ (photograph 2). This consisted of cold egg formed into shapes (not fun shapes, like hedgehogs or lions, though), with ham, sausages and toast. Ok, I say “toast”, but I actually mean “warm bread”. The toaster was about as much use as a jelly in a rainstorm (marginally useful, because you could use it as a hat).

I was part way through eating my cooked breakfast when I looked to my left and saw Sayaka mixing up a disgusting looking substance in a little pot. Rather stupidly, I asked what it was, and she told me to taste some. Even more stupidly, I agreed and tried it. I can only describe it as a mixture of beans, marmite and snot – in looks and taste. Photograph 3 shows this grim concoction.

The final photograph of this ever-expanding blog post is of a cool little contraption that I’ve nicknamed Maggie Jam. Rather than spending time applying margarine and jam to your warm bread, you simply grip the little plastic thing and squeeze. Bingo, out comes your margarine and jam together (photograph 4). It’s very clever. However, you don’t need Theo Profiterole, the Dragon, to point out its fatal flaw:- supposing you don’t want margarine?

I’m told that this will be our last non-Japanese style breakfast for a few days. So, no doubt it’ll be snot, beans and marmite for breakfast tomorrow. Would you like me to put some in a pot and bring it back for you to taste?