Only a Blockhead

Red or white?

A wonderful sunny afternoon spent in Hachioji at their Wine Festival. If you buy a ticket, you get a wine glass and a red pouch to hang around your neck to keep it in, a wrist band, and a map of the dozens of participating restaurants and bars. Then you walk with your friends from place to place, sampling the wines and sometimes snacks. A small fee gets you a refill and a plate of hors d’oeuvres. 

Bar 1: Comment on the quality of the wine.

Bar 2: Compare the wine with the previous place. Decide to wait to next place rather than pay for refill.

Bar 3: Face slightly flushed. Still commenting on quality. Don’t buy refill, but pay for hors d’oeuvres. 

Bar 4: They ran out of red, but you forgo the white—the afternoon is young. Friendly nods to surrounding groups. 

Bar 5: Women heard to murmur about “smaller pours than men get, I’m positive.” Interaction with surrounding groups. Receive unsolicited recommendations for places with good wine. 

Bar 6: Ecstatic greetings from total strangers. Solicit recommendations for places that pour big. 

Bar 7: Finish the sample in two swigs. Ask for refill and happily pull notes from wallet to pay. Buy another refill for the road on the way out.

Bar 8: Each wine tastes better than the last. Misidentify stranger as nephew’s girlfriend’s brother. 

Bar 9: “Red or white?” (Holding out glass:) “Yes, please.” “Um, Red wine or white wine? “Whatever.” Lose sunglasses. Find them on your forehead.

Bar 10: Lose track of whose glass is whose. Claim the fullest one. 

Bar 11: Wax lyrical over the best wine of the evening bar none. Internet check identifies it as 600 yen ($6) a bottle. Flirt outrageously with stranger in the company of your and their significant others.

Between Bar 11 and 12: stop at beer vending machine. Look for bathroom. Duck into convenience store (thank goodness for convenience store bathrooms) and find line of five other people wearing wine glasses around their necks, waiting.

Bar 12: “I dance better when I’m drunk.” Impromptu renditions of popular songs.

Between Bar 12 and 13: enter non-participating restaurant, proffering glass; it is filled. Look around for bathroom… The world is my bathroom!

Bar 13: Fistfight/New best friend for life, but omit to exchange business cards. At one with everyone/everything.

5PM. On way to station, enter shoe shop proffering glass; waylaid by friends.

Train. Oblivion. Reach terminus, and return to Hachoji. Home on second attempt.  

Not really. It was as delightful and convivial as the last such event. This year, there was even a shrine serving sake and plum wine. Again, we thought it would be an ideal event to show off our own town. I left early so missed a final meal with our group, but fellow-Blockhead David was in the party and his photograph is in the previous post. The Good Things indeed.

--Julian

(Many thanks D & J for your inspired suggestions.)

Pollution Solution

I went on a terrific bicycle ride yesterday--a long loop from the Shonan coast to Yokohama, Kawasaki, and back by the inland route. Seven and a half hours in the saddle, in bright sunshine and good company. Wisteria and azaleas were in bloom in hedges and roadside gardens. Lunch was in the relaxed atmosphere of Cactus Burrito, not far from the Tama River in Kawasaki, where we consumed delicious burritos and salsa. Cactus has a fridgeful of excellent craft beers, by the way.

James Szypula was ride planner and navigator for the Yokohama-Kawasaki leg. His Yokohama Rides and Rentals organizes pleasure cycle rides in and around Yokohama. And the night before he’d been busy with homemade stencils.

The result on his bicycle pannier bag is an inspiring combination of image and word evoking the joys of the emission-free open road.

Julian 

Autumn Story 2: Symbiosis

I was out raking the leaves off the road, and the same neighbor who gave me a carton of eggs last time gave me eggs again, this time a dozen in a plastic net inside a small plastic shopping bag. Mindful of the last accident, I placed them carefully under a tree while I worked.

A short while later, I saw a crow flying away with an egg in its beak. Fearing the worst, I found the plastic bag torn, the plastic net cut, but the remaining eggs unbroken.

It must have been an extraordinary find for the crow, for when I picked up the eggs and headed for home, it flapped after me.

 

Skillful thievery

leaves eleven eggs intact:

Omelet for breakfasts.

 

--Julian

One wonderful Sunday

Hachioji, a commuter town on the northern fringes of Tokyo, had the bright idea of holding what I’ll call a wine-athon. On a recent Sunday, about 25 bars and restaurants opened their doors, each serving samples of one or more wines to anyone who had bought a 4,500 yen ($45; £30) event ticket. With a wine glass hanging in a pouch around our necks and armed with an area map, we were encouraged to make our way through the streets from bar to bar. Craft and food stalls lined the main pedestrian way, giving further points of interest. 

I had arrived with a small group of friends at noon. We ate, drank, walked, browsed, talked, as did the other hundreds of participants. Then, as the wine flowed and the afternoon wore on, a wonderful thing happened. People began greeting and meeting strangers in festival spirit, introducing themselves and sharing recommendations for wines and bistros. As darkness fell, conviviality peaked and friendships were forged.

This restaurant/bar set up a stall on the street (Photo: ML)

As well as being a delightful way to spend an afternoon, the event introduced residents to their local restaurants and other businesses. The net effect was to bring warmth and life to a whole neighborhood. 

--Julian 

Val?

--David

Oktoberfest

The Shonan Beer brewery in Kagawa is near my house, and this year I joined their Oktoberfest for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect. The weather has been hot, but today it cooled to a perfect blue-skied sunny autumn day, and what I found was a laid back, well-organized, festival-like event celebrating food, drink, camaraderie and the countryside.

 The brewery surroundings are landscaped with terraces and trees. There was craft beer brewed on the premises; kitchens and pizza ovens pumping out food; pets and pushchairs; families and friends from nearby and further afield; newcomers and annual celebrants, sitting and standing wherever they could find room.

 They had brewed a Cascade IPA for the event, and it was excellent. Others had talked up the Orange IPA as having the tang of fruit without the sweetness, melding with the hoppy bitterness. I tried some before leaving. It was sublime, and was one reason I decided to stay further hours to enjoy it while talking to friends old and new.

 When I finally left, I approached a group of cyclists to ask if they lived locally. No, they said, they had ridden in from Tokyo. I can see that it would be worth pedaling the 50 kilometers to this rural haven, and I wished them a safe ride back. My journey home was considerably shorter, and as evening fell, black Fuji was silhouetted on a sky of palest pink.

 The Oktoberfest lasts for three days: Saturday, today Sunday and tomorrow Monday. It’s one of the most relaxed and friendly events I could imagine, in wonderful surroundings, and I look forward to next year. I hope the Orange IPA is still on tap.

(Photo by Natsumi)

--Julian

Spring Street Smoke House

--David

Summer bounty

Cooling in the kitchen

Vegetables from a neighbor’s stand

Tomatoes sink; cucumbers float

 

--Julian

Coffee! Life! Japan!

"Coffee Life in Japan" has more in common with that spate of books popular a few years ago where an author picked a popular foodstuff — cod, salt, spam, whatever — and then produced a book in which every fact he or she could dig up about that foodstuff was, in more or less entertaining fashion, and with some firsthand reportage thrown in — a behind-the-scenes look at a spam farm in Slovenia! — retailed.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and read the rest of my review of Merry White's Coffee Life in Japan   here.

—David

Random Albion *

Notes from a recent visit to the United Kingdom

Heathrow Airport  A very long walk down boring, utilitarian corridors to a shabby customs area.

On public transport  Passengers talk loudly on cell phones oblivious to those around them.

On escalators  People stand to the right and hurry up the left. (In Kanto, Japan, the opposite. I’m told that Kansai, Japan follows the British pattern. How do these differences happen?)

Architecture and history  Obsolete old buildings are lovingly restored and brought back into use. Near Reading Station, a gorgeous, red stone Victorian 2nd floor frontage stretches the entire block. (Sadly, below, half the stores are boarded up.)

Food and drink  The beer is superb. Brakespear Bitter (an Oxfordshire speciality) manages the impossible—to satisfy, yet be low in alcohol. A mat on the bar says, “Perhaps the greatest beer in the world at 3.4% alcohol.” Andrew Jefford (Financial Times)

There are culinary treasures, and a full English breakfast is one of them. Sausage, bacon, tomato, mushroom, eggs fried or scrambled, sometimes baked beans and, if you’re really lucky, black pudding (blood sausage) and fried bread. All those flavors in your mouth.

Service  A ten-pound note (1300 yen; 15 dollars) causes problems in the hotel cafe; they don’t have enough coin to make change for a cup of tea.

Shop assistants think nothing of talking to each other when customers are in earshot, and sometimes even while serving. They’re bringing their individual selves to the job, along with fulfilling a duty for their employer. It feels slovenly, but it can also make for a friendliness uncommon in Japan: at the market, a question about a loyalty card led to a genuine conversation about where I live, and whether I liked Japan or Britain better.

Footpaths  The countryside is crisscrossed by rights of way. They can be muddy, and treacherous with horse and dog poo, but they make for glorious walking, riding and cycling.

 

But what ultimately sets Japan and the UK apart is the washlet, which is quietly revolutionizing an essential of life. Britain is still a nation of dirty bottoms. I didn’t enjoy reverting to the barbarism of wiping away feces with dry paper.

Narita airport: short corridors carpeted and decorated. Back to the womb.

 --Julian

* Thanks to David for inadvertently suggesting this title.