The first day

DAN

Well, the trip has definitely gotten off to a good start.
Today we -

• Had an enema (my first one!)
• Ate the mashed up genitals of a sea urchin
• Preyed at a shrine (partly) honouring war criminals

All of them were by accident too...

This morning we decided we would just walk into town and see where things took us. As we were walking from the northern part of Sakamachi the first place we got to was the Yasukuni shrine. Having just read about how you should do your best to honour traditions in Japan, we decided to join the queue, toss a coin into the box and bow to the shrine.

Flo probably making the appropriate face for this shrine.

I was sure that I'd heard of Yasukuni shrine before, but it wasn't until we'd gone in to the museum that I realised why the name was so recognisable. The shrine is dedicated to all the warriors that have died in service to the emperor. This includes all the Japanese soldiers of world war 2, including quite a few war criminals! No wonder people were giving us funny looks when we walked up to take a bow. I guess I can tick mistakenly honouring war criminals off the bucket list.

The museum was really fascinating though. It was like visiting the imperial war museum in London, but one in a nation that was the enemy of Britain during world war 2. It was quite a disconcerting experience, reading about kamikaze pilots and the honourable traditions of the samurai, but seeing very little about the more gruesome aspects ("The China Incident" = not officially a war, wtf?) It seemed like the place could easily be a magnet for the more right-wing Japanese people, which made it slightly uncomfortable. I'm glad this was the first place we visited as it really illustrated the conflicted relationship that Japan has with its recent history and will (hopefully) lay a good foundation for the rest of the trip.

The war museum did have some amazing paintings

Which you weren't allowed to take pictures of

From there we walked through the gardens around the shrine and through a really beautiful pond area, where we fed some koi carp and tried to take pictures of dragon flies.

After that we went to the imperial palace gardens, but couldn't get in the palace as it's closed on Mondays. We did go into the Budoken though and saw a ceremony giving awards to some young kenpo and karate students. Unfortunately we got in too late to see them perform, but it was fun just to pop in and see what was going on. We walked along the side of the palace. We spotted a heron and some turtles in large moat around the castle. We threw some of the koi carp food to the turtles they started fighting, so we stopped doing that.

Beautiful lady in front of beautiful scenery

For dinner we went for sushi at the Shin-Maunouchi building, which is a super posh retail mall with 8 different floors. It's worth going in there for a look, but it's also faintly depressing, just like the posh shopping areas in London. I got the feeling that the staff in the sushi place didn't think too much of us. They sat us in a small room far away from the other customers. The room had a coat rack in it.

We ordered 2 sushi sets. Both of them came with a strange yellow paste sushi. I tried one and didn't think too much of it, maybe I'll get to like it after I have a few more, but I doubt it. It took a few dares and double dares to get Emma and Flo to eat half of the other one, but they eventually did. Flo spat hers out, just as someone was walking past the door to our room, so this probably confirmed to them that they made the right choice in keeping us away from the other customers. We later read that the yellow paste was mashed up urchin gonads, which are considered a delicacy, so finding them chewed up and spat out on the plate probably compounded the insult.

Flo choosing her poison

After the sushi, it was time for the toilet. Flo had been talking about the buttons on the toilet since the war museum, but I finally got to give them a try. There were nine buttons for water spray, I decided to try all of them, including high power level 3. High power level 3 was an unexpected experience. I'll leave it at that. It was a shame that they didn't seem to have a dryer in the list of options.

One things that I felt quite acutely today is that no matter how much I consume Japanese culture I will never completely understand what it is to be Japanese. Perhaps I'm wrong and this is just how I feel today. I think probably learning some of the language would be a start.

Tomorrow we will probably go to shibuya and see what we can find there.

Other funny things from today -

• Emma choosing to wear a "pleather" skirt in 35 degree heat.
• Flo feeling half dead (temperature, headache, the works) until she had some iced coffee.

Insects spotted - big ants (yeah!), cicadas, black and white dragon flies, pond skaters, small shiny black beetles, butterfly wings.