Kansai

We’re staying the night on Miyajima Island off the coast of Hiroshima before we head to Kyushu in southern Japan. Most of the shops here close after sunset, once the last ferries take the day-trippers home, and so we have a free night to ourselves. Next week, I’ll spend a couple of hours preparing for and doing my first monthly work call. It’ll be the first time I seriously think about markets in about eight weeks, which feels like a good way to start slowly easing back into society.

We spent the past week in Japan’s Kansai region. Osaka and Kyoto, the two biggest cities, feel like they split Tokyo cleanly into its constituent parts. Osaka is pure neon, packed with street food and commotion; Kyoto, less than an hour away, felt like a different world among its shrines and temples and its quiet alleys. But in both cities, up unremarkable staircases and behind noren curtains, we found all sorts of unexpected, special moments.

A Japanese-style garden

It turns out that the word futon originally referred to traditional Japanese bedding that’s stored in a closet during the day and laid out on tatami mats each night. At Nishimuraya Honkan, in the onsen town of Kinosaki on the northern shore of Kansai, we slept on our first real futons. Without Western-style chairs or desks in our room, we were left with no choice but to spend the day onsen-hopping, interrupted only by the ryokan’s first service of matsuba crab kaiseki for the season. It was our favorite long-form meal of the trip so far.

Gion corner

Kyoto was the first city on our trip where we felt like our time was packed to the brim. On our first day, we got up before sunrise to make it to Fushimi Inari before the crowds and spent the afternoon wandering from shrine to temple to shrine. That night, we izakaya-hopped with Kevin and Yuki, and spent a couple of hours at a Pontocho bar run by a theology grad, tasting sake and thirty-year-old whisky. But over our four days in the city, there would also be quieter moments like this one, walking along the alleyways of Gion, wondering about the conversations behind the closed doors around us.

Inari shrine

We went off the main path at Mount Inari to search for a bamboo forest. A wrong turn led us to a shrine, if you could even call it that, one that looked like it hadn’t been taken care of in years, maybe decades. Fallen bamboo shoots were littered around moss-covered stones and fox statues. In the stillness of the air, we weren’t quite sure whether we were experiencing something magical or eerie; I guess sometimes those feelings are inseparable.

Jouzu!

In Kyoto, we took a pottery class at the base of Hokanji, the pagoda overlooking Sannenzaka. Alice’s long hours of pottery back in New York earned her a “jouzu!” (skilled!) from our instructor, which I’ll admit is probably more impressive than the “nihongo jouzu!” I got from our waitress at Nishimuraya Honkan. But a jouzu is a jouzu, and I’ll take what I can get.

Kuidaore

Osaka was where James and I spent nearly our entire trip to Japan almost a decade ago, and I think I’ll always have a fondness for it. This city seems to be the one place in Japan where people jaywalk and no one seems to know which side of the escalator to stand; in short, the one place in Japan where some degree of chaos is a part of daily life. It actually might not be such a surprise that I feel some affinity for Osaka. In many ways, Alice might be the stereotypical Osakan: outgoing, direct to the point of bluntness, always hustling, and most importantly, food-loving (so much so that there’s a word for their passion for food: kuidaore, to eat oneself bankrupt).

Fish cheeks

The most memorable food we had in Osaka: blowtorched tuna cheek, served by Toyo-san from a kitchen that could have passed as a flea market; kushikatsu (fried skewers, although that really doesn’t do them justice), ordered in broken Japanese at an eight-person counter nestled on a side street in Shinsekai; omurice at a quiet cafe that was sold out for the day by the time we walked out a little past noon.