Central Japan (ft. James and Jesse)

We’re watching the sun rise over a double-decker A380, parked with its nose almost touching the window of the Emirates first-class lounge, roughly halfway through our week-long transit from Tokyo to the Galapagos.

Kevin asked me a few days ago what forty days in Japan taught me about the country that I didn’t know before. I think the answer is something like: understanding more deeply the idea that putting time, effort, and thought into something, doing that thing right, even if few would notice—even if no one would notice—can imbue it with something intangible but still important. Does using the spring water of Mt. Tennozan make Yamazaki whisky taste better? Do Japanese archers who shoot truthfully, with goodness and a virtuous spirit, hit their target more accurately? Do the deep bows of hotel staff to a departing car, when no one in that car is looking back, change the guest experience at all? I don’t know, but after these six weeks, I believe more than I did before that the answer doesn’t really matter.

We spent our last week in Japan with James and Jesse, who had come to visit us over Thanksgiving. It was the first time the four of us had been on a trip together abroad since 2019, and spending time with our friends after being mostly on our own for the past two months was really special.

Tokyo Record Bar

There’s a Tokyo Record Bar in New York that opened a couple of years ago. For some almost triple-digit price, you can have a izakaya-inspired tasting menu and request a couple of songs to play off their turntable. It’s a fun spot, but it’s not quite the same as listening to DJs spin loopy Japanese jazz off vinyl in a small, underground room in Shibuya.

Japanese countryside

Most of this past week was spent on a roadtrip from Tokyo to Kyoto, passing through parts of the Japanese countryside that only a car can get to. One of these places was Tomioka. We were there to see the town’s silk mill, which was a project of the Meiji government to bring Western-style silk-spinning techniques to Japan in the late 1800s. The town’s population has been unchanged at around fifty thousand for the past sixty years, and here you could really feel, in a way that was present but not quite as obvious in the larger cities, how locked in the past Japan seems.

Ten years later

We spent an afternoon at our ryokan in Ikaho having “computer time” over highballs made from the finest Japanese whisky that the Lawson down the street had to offer. Lots of things have changed over the last decade, but at least one thing is still exactly the same: the good vibes of doing work with your friends around a table, a bunch of plates and glasses piled up around you, waiting for dinner.

Is there wasabi?

One of the main destinations for our roadtrip was Shirakawa-go, a village famous for its thatched roof farmhouses. We stayed in the nearest Airbnb, about an hour away in a town called Takayama, and were surprised to find out when we arrived that Takayama was apparently a huge tourist destination. James spent most of our dinner in Takayama talking about how tourist-y the restaurant and the other people in it seemed. But when the chef brought us our nigiri, he asked if there was wasabi for his soy sauce, a hilariously tourist-y thing to say when of course the wasabi had already been carefully added between the rice and fish. The chef unamusedly informed him of the same.

Reversible destiny

On the way from Takayama to Kyoto, we stopped at The Site of Reversible Destiny, a created landscape/art installation/series of architectural pavilions that opened in 1995. It was pretty bizarre. Between the giant flock of crows overhead, the five-ish visitors across four acres of installations with names like Trajectory Membrane Gate and Critical Resemblance House, the randomly scattered parts of chairs, ovens, and toilets, and the giant Elliptical Field that reminded us of a Halo map, we got the creeps pretty quickly. We decided to get out of there and back on the road to Kyoto while the sunlight was still streaming out over the mountains in the distance.

Visiting Nara again, for the first time

James and I spent a day in Nara on our last trip to Japan about ten years ago, but somehow I didn’t remember anything about it other than a vignette of feeding some deer on a wide-open field and the unagi-don we had while sheltering from the rain before we left. Memories seem to fade so easily, and I guess that’s the reason this blog exists.

Sticking with Hibiki

On our last day together (and Alice and I’s last full day in Japan), we visited Yamazaki, about half an hour south of Kyoto, and its eponymous distillery. Alice had the great idea of keeping us honest in a blind taste test of three vintages each of Yamazaki and Hibiki, each a significant digit more expensive than the last. The ranking of the Hibiki was immediately clear to each of us, but our guesses on the Yamazaki were all over the place. Even after several open tastings, Jesse managed to confuse the Yamazaki 25 for its forty-times less expensive cousin once we went blind again. I guess we know what Japanese whisky we’ll be drinking from now on.