Southwestern Japan

James and Jesse have arrived in Japan, and the four of us are each occupying a corner of the room at our ryokan after dinner. Alice is fast asleep, James is hunched over his laptop, probably trading around some dogcoin or another, and Jesse is listening in on a work call, while I catch up on a couple of days of my journal and this blog post.

Our week in southwestern Japan marked the last leg of our tour through the country on our own. It was a bit of a grab bag of things we each wanted to see: the A-bomb dome and Okonomiyaki Lopez; a floating torii gate and a porcelain one. We’ll spend one more week in the countryside between Tokyo and Kyoto with James and Jesse before embarking on a thirty-hour flight to the furthest point on the globe from Japan: Brazil.

As you like it

The bomb was dropped over the T-shaped Aioi Bridge from which this photo was taken, just north of the former city center. In its aftermath, with the restaurant culture of the city having been effectively wiped out overnight, people used whatever they had—cabbage, onions, flour, and iron plates from the rubble around them as griddles—to make okonomiyaki, “grilled-as-you-like-it”. Today, there are hundreds of okonomiyaki shops throughout the city. One of the most famous is run by a Guatemalan chef who we watched assemble the many layers of the dish with the force of his whole body. Okonomiyaki is Hiroshima’s soul food, and that feels fitting in more ways than one.

Low tide at Itsukushima

Itsukushima is one of the three classical scenic views of Japan, known as the nihon sankei. At high tide, this torii gate looks like it is floating on the water. We spent our day here sampling oysters and momiji manju. After the sun set and the daytrippers caught the last ferry back to Hiroshima, we saw a few of the deer that roam the island look longingly into stores that were closing up for the night.

Drops of light

We stayed for two days at Takefue, a ryokan that was worth a special journey, as the tire company says, from Fukuoka. At one of our onsens, a single drop of water would gather on the end of a bamboo flute, and from a certain angle, each droplet would look like a growing ball of pure light, lingering at the tip of the spout for a split second before falling away. Unfortunately, Alice spent most of her time at Takefue horizontally, leveled by a bout of food poisoning.

Kurisumasu maaketto

The Japanese take Christmas seriously. Every city seems to have an extravagant illumination along its main streets, and Fukuoka’s Christmas market had mulled wine and bratwurst stalls that reminded us of the ones in Germany and Austria that we explored last Thanksgiving. We realized that we had spent November 20 in both 2023 and 2024 having a rest and relaxation day at a Ritz-Carlton (in Berlin and Fukuoka), and decided that November 20 henceforth would be our annual “R&R at the R” Day.

Sueyama shrine

Arita is considered the birthplace of Japanese porcelain, and was the stop on our Japan trip that Alice was most excited about. City map installations, bridge spires, and even torii gates were made of porcelain. We thought this shrine was particularly beautiful and came back twice, the second time in the early morning just as the sun was beginning to rise over the mountains in the east.

Arita-yaki

In Arita, we stayed in a rented Japanese-style room on top of a café, hunted through a pottery buffet for bowls, vases, and cups to ship home, and spent an evening in one of the three local izakayas. Arita was the first place in Japan where it felt to us like the number of restaurants was finite, and where something other than food had been elevated to the local obsession. But even still, Arita seemingly couldn’t escape the national preoccupation with eating: porcelain from the town is known as Arita-yaki.

Three miles an hour

In Kyoto, on our way back to Tokyo, our trip around the world intersected with Paul Salopek’s. He’s been walking for eleven years (and counting) from the cradle of human civilization in Ethiopia to its final frontier at the tip of South America. So much of what we loved about having walked through the cities of Japan over these past five weeks were the little details that only appeared when we moved at walking speed. It was pretty cool to share some kindred understanding, even if just a little, what Paul meant when he talked about experiencing the world’s stories at the pace of three miles an hour. He knows what Alice said in her blog post: that walking is the best way to get local color.