Japan Day 6 - Train time :-)

Alex walked the dog and then came back to say goodbye before rasping into the city on his scooter. Chisato and I took Daiki to Hopia where I said goodbye and gave him a hug. Walking away from Hopia as he cried in the arms of the staff evoked emotions that I rarely experience and realised then that I would miss being around him a great deal.

Chisato drove us down to Kagoshima station and we popped into Starbucks for a coffee and a cake. After a well needed caffeine boost I said my final goodbye to Chisato and headed off to catch the train. Kagoshima station is enormous and even has a huge Ferris wheel attached to the roof in much the same way the British stations don't. The final approach to the brand new Kyushu Shinkansen was every bit as slick as one would expect and as luck would have it, a train was to depart in less then 10 minutes.

The Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, is unlike any other train I can think of, at least on my planet anyway. The sides are flat and box-like with small Japanese size doors and oversized aircraft-like windows. The platforms are quite high in comparison to Western trains making the roof appear lower so the whole thing looks seriously cool! The space-age station is less than 3 years old but I couldn't understand why the platform seemed to point West instead of North.

The interior is every bit as box-like as you'd expect from looking at it but the seats are spaced out with 'Business Class' generosity. A digital display presents the itinerary in Japanese and English and the announcements are equally top-notch. As we head off (and this still amuses me) between 0 and 1 second past the scheduled departure time you move forward in a steady but consistently increasing velocity that holds for a while before gently ramping up to around 160 MPH.

It then becomes clear why we are heading West as almost all of the currently operating section of this line is tunnelled through the mountains right the way through to Yatsushiro and so it doesn't matter which way it goes, they've just blasted it through the mountains at what I can only imagine to be phenomenal expense. The carriage barely moves and feels like very mild turbulence at worst and smooth flight at best and given the fact that you are almost always in a tunnel, the dark windows really make you feel as though you are in a plane.

Sadly, the remaining Northern section is not yet complete and so we switch trains with Japanese efficiency and trundle through the rest of the island at a more leisurely but still impressive 80 MPH. As Hakata station draws near, the automated announcement broadcasts its polite message in Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese before we're invited to leave the train bang on time and rather impressed.

Fukuoka is quite big and I wasn't planning to stop here but I'd been told that to miss a Hakata Ramen would be like going to the capital of Ukraine and not having a chicken Kiev. Actually, I've done that and so to make sure I didn't make another culinary faux-pas I chucked my bags in a locker, shoved in my 5 x 100 yen coins and clicked the door shut seconds before realising I'd left my LP inside :-(

Rather than waste any more money on retrieving my trusty guide I thought I'd try and live without it so I wandered down to the subway station and faced up to the reality of Japanese transport, incomprehensible signage! I stared at it for a while and then thought I'd stumble through it using the numbers as the basis to buy a ticket but just as I was about to gamble on my choice of button, the familiar word 'English' appeared in the corner of the screen. I pressed it and not only did the instructions magically make sense but a little voice pointed out that it was now operating in 'English mode'.

If you've ever been to Oxford Circus you'll appreciate that emerging from the tube you are faced with a perfectly mirrored crossroads that makes it extremely difficult to work out which way is which. Tenjin (Fukuoka's CBD) is no different and to help confuse you further, all maps seem to ignore the tradition in other countries of making North point up and rather opt for the best way to present the city from the point of view of the map maker. The upshot of this was that I had to descend back into the bowels of Tenjin subway station, which is truly enormous and mimics the crossroads in exactly the same way, to find some more information.

Given Fukuoka's thriving tourist trade (at least in the Japanese sense) it didn't take too long to find a tourist information booth that provided maps but the whole point of having my LP guide was to try and locate the famous Ichirin Ramen bar that I my stomach was now equally keen to . I'd remembered roughly where it was (and what it was called) and after a few minutes I managed to work it out and headed back outside to a now rainy Fukuoka. Here I was faced with musical pedestrian crossings and towering buildings, most of which had signs on them and fortunately for me in English. It took a few more minutes for me to properly get my bearings and my perseverance was soon to pay off.

Ichirin Ramen bar is awesome! If you've ever been to vote and whilst choosing which git to install in office you'd thought to yourself "I'd really like a bowl of noodles" then this is the place for you. First of all, you walk in to a very dark series of corridors and the Japanese hostess bleats out the standard welcome before asking you for your ticket. You then go back outside into the rain and see the vending machine that is adorned with various side dishes but only a single button at the top entitled "Ramen". The customisation of your ramen is what gives Ichirin its edge over other Restaurants and upon returning to the narrow passageways inside you are soon faced with a series of single seat booths, many of which are already occupied by local ramen addicts.

You sit down at your booth and much like going to vote you are given a form but this one is to customise and enhance your ramen. The booth is somewhat cramped, at least from the point of view of your portly narrator, and you can't help but notice the bamboo screen covering the lower 10 inches of the wall in front of you whilst you start to complete the incredibly detailed questionnaire that has been conveniently written in both English and Japanese. The choices are mostly on a 1 to 5 scale concerning strength of overall flavour, garlic, secret sauce, fattiness?!? and onion content. You can even flip to page 2 and make additions of more pork, egg and all manner of things but these cost extra and so other than more pork I stuck to the basics. Once you've completed the form you press a button and the bamboo screen immediately lifts up to a show the midriff of a Ramen chef welcoming you in the standard manner before taking your tickets, questionnaire and if applicable, additional money. You can then help yourself to water from a bar style tap whilst trying to stoop low enough to see if you can work out what on earth is behind you.

This neck stretching is fruitless as all you can see are the bamboo screens of your fellow eaters in the corridor opposite and so you recompose yourself and wait anxiously for your lunch. It is of course true to say that Ramen should be slurped and this is actively encouraged although I'm really not sure how you could eat one in silence anyway. I'd prepared for this event by wearing one of my many black tee shirts in the hope that it would hide even the most subtle of noodle-borne splashbacks.

Within minutes the screen pops open and your perfect ramen sits there steaming in front of you and the bamboo screen closes once again to allow you solitude in this amazing place. It is delicious although I have to say I think I was spoiled in Kagoshima as the meat was in no way comparable to Kyushu's finest glistening belly pork. The soup on the other hand was heavenly and I proceeded to attack it's generous, garlicy goodness with gusto!

Once I'd slurped back the last of the soup I sat transfixed wondering how on earth I could transplant this entire restaurant and its staff to the UK and then live in it forever. Anything else, at least at that moment, seemed pointless and it was quite a struggle to pop myself out of the cabin and return to the dreary streets of Fukuoka.

Despite the rain (and the will to remain in Ichirin all day) I wandered off in the general direction of the station rather than descending into the subway. I passed by endless vending machines and particularly attractive women before arriving at Canal City which is a cheesy shopping complex/cinema/hotel complex. By this time I realised that after such an amazing lunch (I'll stop talking about that now I promise) Fukuoka couldn't possibly offer me anything better in the time I had although the major Sumo competition was tempting. I'd seen some wrestlers in the station when I arrived but the main event wasn't to start until much later and so I grabbed my bags and jumped back on the Shinkansen and headed up to Hiroshima.

Hana hostel was to be my new home for the next 2 nights and I was a little apprehensive about jumping back into the backpacker life, especially after 4 nights of family life in Kagoshima. Nevertheless I made up my bed and headed straight out to the most obvious place I could think of as I was quite tired and knew that I wouldn't be out for long.

The A-Bomb dome as it is known is the remains of the Hiroshima prefectural hall and it was situated several feet away from the Hypo-centre of the worlds first offensive atomic explosion. As you might imagine, the whole area is somewhat haunting and I'm not sure if I can explain my feelings on the subject nor whether or not I should. The park opposite contains a number of memorials of that fateful event that occurred at 09:15 on the 6th of August 1945 and I had a quick look around before heading in to town. After all, tomorrow would allow me much more time to take everything in.

I wandered back towards the centre of town and the cold evening was made all the more intense by the fact that my fabulous, wonderful, ramen (sorry) had worn off and I was becoming tired, hungry and cold. As a pick me up I thought I'd have a can of coffee so I simply revolved on the spot until I saw a vending machine and reviewed the products on offer, one of which was a bottle of tea! I'm sceptical about milk at the best of times so I was tickled pink when I saw that the tea was not only black but hot as well. I am now hooked on hot bottled tea as this one washed away the fatigue and renewed my spirits in that curious way that only tea can (or is it canned tea ;-). I redoubled my efforts to find an interesting sounding place mentioned in the LP that served one of Hiroshima's specialities, Okonomiyaki, in a multitude of similar outlets all housed together in one building.

I sat down at one of the many eager vendors stalls in front of a hot plate, very similar to those found in Teppenyaki restaurants. The owner took my order of the basic offering and started by pouring pancake mix into a small circle in front of me before piling it high with shredded cabbage, onions and all manner of bits and pieces, some of which looked like carpet dust. He then topped it off with a portion of udon noodles and some strips of pork before flipping it over to sizzle. The whole time his assistant busied himself doing everything the owner didn't want to such as preparing the next batch of noodles and cleaning up, Japanese hierarchy in action! Once the strange pile of pork lined vegetables had sizzled for a while he cracked an egg and spread it around into a disk before placing the whole lot on top of it and then smothering it in a hoisin type sauce. Final preparations involved sprinkling all sorts of stuff on top of it before moving it towards me. He then passed me a small bowl, some chopsticks and a metal spatula with which to slice off chunks and serve myself small portions whilst keeping the rest warm. It was, as I'm sure you've already guessed, delicious and I'd happily have another one some other time, providing I was hungry enough to finish it!

Having had 2 delicious meals in one day I thought I'd better head back to the hostel for a rest and to try and keep up with what you should know by now to be a rather aggressive writing schedule. My roommates were a curious looking Japanese teenager with more mobile phones than fingers and a curious habit of getting in and out of bed to answer the various streams of texts that they attracted as well as an older man from Taiwan. The Taiwanese chap had a large camera (Nikon I'm sad to say ;-) and managed to explain he was from Taiwan until his English gave out forcing us to make appreciative facial gestures until we settled back into our bunks.

After catching up on various computer based duties I settled down to a long but fairly light sleep wondering where to start in the morning, the Yamato museum or the Mazda factory, find out which choice I made in the next exciting post!!!