For the first time I made it outside of the mass of humanity that is the Kanto area. I decided instead of forking over $900 to the greedy airlines to take me on a two hour flight from Narita to Qingdao, I’d take the train and boat super happy combination vacation.

The bullet trains out of Tokyo Station run more than every hour, and they take you from there all the way down to Kokura, the northern most city on the island of Kyushu, in about 5 hours and a bit. There are different kinds of bullet trains, and I opted for the one that allowed me to see the beautiful Japanese countryside at 300KM/h. They call it the Noizumi and it’s about $200 one way. May seem a bit much, but it makes few stops, the seats are big, there’s tons of leg room and you get to check out Kyoto and Hiroshima on the way. A lot of the time you spend barreling through the darkness of mountain tunnels. It can be strange going at that speed on ground for extensive distances. If the train were to hit anything on the tracks, or even worse, collide with another train, it would probably give Hiroshima a run for it’s money.

Once I made it to Kokura, I had to transfer to another train and backtrack to Shimonoseki, where all the ferries to China and Korea were. This was no easy task being as I was caring around all my luggage and a bike, and there were no directions on where to go to switch trains. I somehow accomplished this using my superpower of reading overhead signs in Japanese. Hint: look for the symbols printed on your ticket.

I finally arrived in Shimonoseki around 7:30, exactly 30 minutes after the city had officially shut down for the night. I checked into the Wing International Hotel, conveniently a minute’s walk from the train station, and proceeded to the nearest 7/11 where I acquired several rations of microwave gyoza (something I am strangely addicted to), Sapporo Draft and dried fruit snacks.

The next day, I assembled my long dormant bike and spent most of the day cruising around the city. At first it reminded me so much of Kitchener, because it’s really only that big, and had a real towny feel to it, but then it started to remind me of Preston, because the average age of the population appears to be 76. There really wasn’t anyone around and it was eerily quiet other than the random old Japanese person walking by. The city is clean, not as anti-septic as Tokyo, but better than anywhere in China. The waterfront is nice, lots of little piers and boardwalks and there’s a Marineland type deal with windows where you can check out the dolphins who will give you the “free willy” look. One of the interesting things I saw as I pedaled along was a fisherman catching a medium sized octopus which I’ve never seen done before, and the bait he had used was a squid.

Later in the day I picked up my $160 dollar boat ticket, which has gotta be one of the cheapest ways to get to and from this island, and I figured that being as it was to be my last night in Japan I might as well have sushi. While I was at the travel agency, I asked the helpful agent where the best place was in town. She pointed me to this place called Karato Ichiba, a fish warehouse, and told me to head to the second floor.

So I left around 6:15, and arrived at the place but it looked dead. I began thinking she had played a little joke on the gaijin, but I climbed up to the 2nd floor and sure enough nestled in between the offices of the warehouse was a sushi place. And what a place it was, it had a multi-page waiting list, where you had to write down your name, then go wander around and wait for the lady to shout your name. Luckily I was on my own, and even though there was a relaxing looking sunset going on outside, I quickly got called up to take my place at the sushi bar. I then tried very hard to put several species of fish into extinction. The sushi was so damn good, I don’t even know what to compare it to. The fish was so fresh as the warehouse was downstairs. Every morsel was like eating a piece of molten butter. I know that sounds disgusting, but both you and I know, if it weren’t horribly fattening, we would do it. It was so smooth and there was no fishy taste to it at all. If I was blindfolded, I wouldn’t have even known what the hell I was eating. These fish were obviously caught with the bare hands of virgin supermodels in the crystal clear lakes of Elysium. I ate a pretty massive amount and picked more than my fair share of the more expensive fatty fish sushis, had a draft Asahi, and the bill only came out to $34. I bet tubby cockneys spend more than that on frozen fish sticks.

So now I’m almost out of this interesting little city in south Japan. I leave in the morning, and I’ll be oddly happy to get back to Qingdao and into a place where I can understand the swear words the locals are yelling at me. I like Japan, but unless you know the language, you’re pretty much as useless as a girl in a gay bar cause very few people speak English, and once you get into the smaller cities, it’s only the travel agents and the one guy in the Hotel. Also I can’t help but feel like I’m getting the stink eye from some of the older people, which is almost everyone, but I don’t really care. One more funny thing about this town, apparently it’s the capital of the Fugu fish, the puffer fish that only has a tiny little piece of edible meat, and the rest is deadly. Every year some poor wanker dies from eating one. No, this year that wanker will not be me.

Filed under: tourist shit