Antony Tran

Upon hear­ing rumours of the Ger­man Beer Fes­ti­val, Okto­ber­fest, being cel­e­brated in Yoko­hama, we decided to take a day trip out and see how the Japan­ese have inter­preted this small piece of Euro­pean cul­ture [and drink beer!]. Yoko­hama is Japan’s sec­ond largest city and so we were very much expect­ing another Tokyo-style metrop­o­lis. How­ever, it seemed much more laid back and the walk along the marina had a par­tic­u­larly relaxed feel [not a phrase ever used to describe Tokyo!]. As with most towns in Japan, soft, ambi­ent music is played in the street through loud­speak­ers. The effect is extremely sub­tle and for some rea­son, I can’t help but smile as I walk past. If such a sys­tem were to be deployed in Lon­don, I would prob­a­bly be vehe­mently opposed on the grounds of encour­ag­ing an over­bear­ing, Big Brother gov­ern­ment. Per­haps I’m still look­ing at Japan through rose-tinted glasses, but it, and other quirky, ‘never-in-the-west’ ele­ments, just seems to ‘work’ here. This is a feel­ing I sus­pect will change as I tran­si­tion from a tourist to a long-term resident…

The bay area in Yokohama.

Yoko­hama is home to a China Town and so we paid it a quick visit before enter­ing the beer fes­ti­val. It is some­what larger than the one in Lon­don and it was inter­est­ing to see how they have adopted some of the Japan­ese cus­toms [shout­ing ‘irasshaimase’ every 5 sec­onds at you walk past their store], yet man­age to retain the unique Chi­nese cul­tural feel. I had a small ‘char siu bao’ type thing and was extremely dis­ap­pointed to see that the bun was mostly empty! A great shame, since this was all I would have to eat for the next 6 hours…

Gate at entrance to China Town in Yokohama.

The entrance fee to the fes­ti­val was 200 JPY, and I had naively thought that this would cover
all of the beer you could drink — how wrong I was! It turns out that every drink was about 1000 JPY (about £7.50) and you also required a 1000 JPY deposit for the glass. This is about 4x more expen­sive than usual (but the beer is of course, of the spe­cial Ger­man vari­ety) so I decided to only indulge in a sin­gle drink, and sip it very, very slowly. I talked to some of Tom’s friends who were there, who had been work­ing in an IT com­pany in Tokyo for sev­eral years. Their kind advice? ‘DON’T WORK IN JAPAN!’ [too much pres­sure and expec­ta­tion, lit­tle reward, inane cus­toms and tra­di­tions] Duly noted.

Okto­ber­fest!

We got hun­gry towards 7.30PM and so some of us headed back to China Town for a suit­able place to eat. There were a few ‘all-you-can-eat’ places for around 2,500 JPY (about £19.00) but we set­tled for a small place on a side street after being heav­ily mar­keted to by the pro­pri­etor. It was inter­est­ing that the owner kept look­ing at me whilst speak­ing [on account of the fact that I look most likely to under­stand Japan­ese]; I sim­ply nod­ded at seem­ingly appro­pri­ate times and threw in a few ‘soo desu’ for good mea­sure. They squeezed us on to a table in the mid­dle of the restau­rant and we had a set meal of about 5–6 dif­fer­ent dishes. The dishes cho­sen for the set meal were quite unusual, includ­ing one with stir-fried veg­eta­bles and chicken skins. I thought I knew what to expect from the set menu in a Chi­nese restau­rant, but appar­ently even the Chi­nese food in Japan is dif­fer­ent! There was talk of karaoke after the meal, but the long jour­ney home sucked the life out of us and so headed our sep­a­rate ways and off to bed.

Last week, we were for­tu­nate enough to wit­ness a Japan­ese pub­lic hol­i­day [no school!] cel­e­brat­ing elderly peo­ple; to com­mem­o­rate this day we decided to go and see the Fuji Five Lakes! We man­aged to recruit nine eager JLSPers and set off early on Sun­day morn­ing for the bus to Fuji from Shin­juku. We had a few ‘com­pe­tent’ Japan­ese speak­ers with us so I felt safe in know­ing that we would be able to ask for help from the locals, if required. I sat next to Phoebe who pro­claimed within the first five min­utes: ‘I’m feel­ing really ill!’ and ‘I’m going to go to sleep, so I prob­a­bly won’t talk!’; I knew I was in for a fun bus jour­ney! To her credit, she only slept for half of the jour­ney and had the decency to not sneeze in my direc­tion so I guess things could have been worse We passed the Fuji High­lands theme park on the way there, and in hind­sight that prob­a­bly would have made for a much more inter­est­ing holiday…

If only…

Due to the traf­fic, we arrived at Lake Kawaguchiko about 2 hours later than we thought we would. The lake was extremely scenic and was filled with swan boats akin to those found in Ueno park. There were also var­i­ous lux­ury boats and water sports tak­ing place. How­ever, some of us had our hearts set on swim­ming and so we set off to find more suit­able place, Lake Saiko. The map claimed that it was 12KM away and we had a seri­ous debate on whether or not it would be a good idea to walk there [I voted NO!]. We man­aged to fig­ure out the local bus sys­tem and took one along some moun­tain­ous paths towards Lake Saiko. We found an open spot near the lake and setup our camp for the day.

Kawaguchiko Crew!

We were in a rather awk­ward posi­tion on the lake, right in between some­one who was fish­ing and a pile of old wooden boats. ‘Swim­ming’ became bor­ing sur­pris­ingly quickly [cold water did not help!] and so we had to think of another way to spend our time. Although there were 3 other lakes that we had not yet seen, I doubted my level of inter­est in them and so I decided my time would be bet­ter spent lying on the shore of Lake Saiko, work­ing on my tan. I was joined by the Finns and we waved the oth­ers good­bye after sug­gest­ing a vague ren­dezvous time [’meet later, in town’]. We had sol­i­dar­ity in our dis­like of ‘doing stuff’ and we were per­fectly happy to just relax on our lit­tle ‘beach’ and watch the sun slowly set in the distance.

Beach life.

Our bliss­ful exis­tence was inter­rupted by an alarm­ing phone call from the oth­ers, who now found them­selves ‘in the mid­dle of nowhere’ and with no way to get back in time for check in at the hos­tel. It was up me and the Finns to make it to there in time and save the day! At the time, we had no idea where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we were going to get there; the odds were heav­ily stacked against us suc­ceed­ing! There was no sim­ple to way to get back to town from our cur­rent posi­tion, so we decided to take the easy [and expen­sive] option and call for a taxi. We stum­bled into a nearby hotel and I man­aged to ges­ture for them to call a taxi for us back to Lake Kawaguchiko [much harder than it sounds!]. The taxi cost the princely sum of 3,700 JPY but it was a small price to pay to ensure that we had some­where to stay that night. We then took a train from the town towards the hos­tel and used all of our com­bined cun­ning to locate it. Upon enter­ing, we had to take off our shoes and wear com­mu­nal slip­pers. We assured the hotel clerk that our friends were going to arrive later and she us into the room after sign­ing a few documents.

When the oth­ers arrived, we asked the hos­tel owner [an Amer­i­can guy by the name of ‘Michael’] to rec­om­mend some places to eat, and he walked us to his friends place for some real tra­di­tional cui­sine. He seemed like a really nice and gen­uine guy so we trusted every­thing he said. How­ever, the food and drinks at the restau­rant were rather expen­sive, and the par­tic­u­lar dish I had [fried octo­pus] did not go down well at all. The oth­ers shared my thoughts! Com­pared to other places I had been to in Japan, this did not rank highly on the list. Per­haps we just aren’t used to eat­ing ‘real’ Japan­ese food? The more likely con­clu­sion that most of us had come to was that we had been setup by the hos­tel owner! We headed to the 7/11 after­wards to sup­ple­ment our diet with ice cream and then went back home for a well-earned rest.

I will now quickly sum­marise the few days fol­low­ing the Fuji Five Lakes trip. I am mas­sively behind in terms of real time so I think it’s bet­ter for me to catch up now or else I will quickly lose enthu­si­asm for blog­ging — not good! If you want to hear about any­thing in more detail, feel free to ask.

- Sec­ond day at Five Lakes; vis­it­ing some shrines and parks; saw lots of spi­ders

Stairs, tem­ples, mountains.

- Lucy’s birth­day; karaoke and drink­ing in Shibuya; lots to live up to for my birth­day!
– Trip to Life Sav­ing Cen­ter; earth­quake and typhoon sim­u­la­tion; chance to use a fire extin­guisher

Sim­u­la­tion of a 7.0 mag­ni­tude earthquake!

- Shabu Shabu in Shin­juku with some Japan­ese vol­un­teers; dip­ping meat in raw egg; karaoke trip #3

Post shabu-shabu karaoke.

- Yoyogi Park with Kaisa-chan; some kind of Indian fes­ti­val nearby; ate a doner kebab

Yoyogi Park!

- Aki­habara, Elec­tric Town; tech heaven; sur­pris­ingly expen­sive

A wild Pikachu has appeared!

- Aikido at the uni­ver­sity club with Tom and Phoebe; really fun to try, peo­ple very friendly and patient; may con­tinue regularly!