22nd of April: Aomori spring festival

Famous Japanese toilets. This one is a simple model with only a handful of features

There's bidet controls and seat heating controls - a basic model available everywhere. It's not uncommon to have more functions, like sound generation

(Japan truly is a mysterious country; despite those toilets being commonplace, it is not rare to see a public toilet that is just a hole in the floor with some plumbing, and no one bats an eyelid)

Quite a view from the hotel window it was.

One interesting observation: Atsuko doesn't speak Japanese, but Nina has basic fluency. All the hieroglyphics are just noise for Akko, so she is very quick to spot labels in English ("hey, it's Yamaha! Wow, it's Toyota"). Nina, hearing that, gets very confused, because in her mind/eyes "YAMAHA" wall sign is not much more remarkable/easy to spot than "国際ホール" next to it.

This creates some frustration in supermarkets, too. Nina is browsing the shelves and reads the small print to make sure there's no crab in pickled cucumber (there was) and no bacon in boiled potatoes (there was), but for Akko that seems to be just boring/confusing.

Being vegetarian as a tourist in Japan is a bit challenging. Fish and/or meat are often added to the food, even in the "vegetable section" (again, unforgivable crab mixed with pickles). But there are some good options, for example, umeboshi onigiri (rice balls with pickled plum filling), or egg mayo sandwiches, or adzuki bean dorayaki (cream and bean filled pancakes). Inari pockets and inari onigiri are also great (fried tofu filled with rice). Calbee, sort-of-freeze-dried-french-fries, is also an option.

All of those, and many more, are available in most konbini (convenience stores, open 24/7 and full of everything, including food), and are quite delicious.

The konbini next to the hotel has a lottery section. It seems to work this way: you buy a ticket and you get a random prize from the catalogue (for example, vocaloid goods, from keychains to figurines).

🚉 On our way to the next stop: Hakodate

Shinkansen line to Sapporo has not been completed just yet, so we are taking a regular train to the Hokkaido Shinkansen, which currently terminates at a city called Hakodate. We are only going to spend 20 minutes there, unfortunately - otherwise we would try and see the city from the Mount Hakodate next to it.

The train line runs along the sea coast.

One hour before the arrival, the train conductor informs the train that there is an issue with the Shinkansen, and asks everyone with the Shinkansen tickets to let him know.

We start panicking and consider booking our seats for the next train. The conductor asks everyone to be patient, so we try to chill.

Few minutes later, the conductor informs that the issue with the track has been safely resolved, and the Shinkansen will depart as expected.

😅 Phew.

This is the future.

The future is now.

🚄 This is the Hokkaido and Touhouku Shinkansen (bullet train)

The route length is 675 km, and the regular top speed of this rocket is 320 km/h; it is expected that the speed will increase to 360 km/h in the next few years.

It looks more like a plane than a train. The chairs are wide, and they recline generously.

There are wall plugs, naturally. Though they won't be enough to power a hair dryer or a teapot (not that you should try).

Mountains are pretty

Shinkansen's toilet is more advanced than in the hotel: not just heating, but also a "Privacy mode" that plays ambient music, hiding all the noises.

Baby changing table instructions:

Caution, drop!
Never leave
Keep watch...

A short stopover for a long lunch break: Aomori, famous for its intense weather (snow, so so so so much snow, that the houses have doors on the second floor) and, apparently, its apples. This is a bell, not an apple

The station explains how the tunnel to the Hokkaido works: 240 meters below the sea surface, 23.3km long

Local apple juice is delicious. There are three juice varieties, from sour to sweet.

The station has an exhibition of paper lanterns. Among the lanterns there's the Jomon guy and the apple-shaped darumas.

(this is one of the famous sculptures made by Jomon people, the ancient inhabitants of Japan, some ten to fifteen thousand years ago; photo from the internets)

(this is a daruma doll, a doll that stands right up if tipped; it symbolises resilience and is considered a good luck; one eye is painted when you make a wish/goal, something you want to work towards to, and the other one is painted when you reach the goal; also from the internets)

Aomori JR railroad station has a large shopping arcade with souvenirs (apples, apple-shaped things, apple pies, apple cakes), local foods and a couple of noodle shops. The place is bustling with life.

But this is not why we're stopping at Aomori, 🙂‍↔️

When people hear "Japan", they often think about sakura blossoms. But sakura blooms only for two weeks in the spring! It happens in mid-March in the South, late March in Kyoto, and mid-April in Tokyo. And, as you know, Hokkaido is much colder, so sakura season starts only around the 25th of April.

When we booked our trip, the blossom forecast hinted that sakura will be in full bloom far North, in the town of Morioka, today. Which we hoped to see. But the weather was warm, and the sakura in Morioka has reached full bloom on the 17th. It's been raining since, so it's quite possible most of the petals were washed off. What a shame, to miss the sakura season just by a couple of days...

Or?!

Aomori is 180km to the North of Morioka, and the full sakura blossom had been reached only recently. There are some really scenic spots for sakura viewing, but those are out of reach with our tight schedule.

However, there's a Spring Festival in Aomori's Gappo park, which is just 20 minutes away by car from the train station. So, we planned a two hour long stopover in Aomori, and we did not regret it.

The variety of sakura here is white-pink "yoshino" sakura. Very common, very pretty, but somewhat different from more famous abroad pink varieties of sakura

There are a few pink sakuras, too, but the park is full of yoshino sakuras, over 600.

The Spring Festival looks exactly as you might have seen festivals in anime: stalls with dango (rice dumplings with no filling), takoyaki (squid in flour), taiyaki (waffles with sweet filling), okonimyaki (sort of omelette), yakitori (chicken skewers), soba (noodles). No candied apples (out of season), candied strawberries instead. Crepes! Gacha games, air guns, lotteries. There were 2-3 of each stalls, except for oden (warm soup), corn and ice cream - only one of each

The Goppo park, by the way, is a seaside park.

The sea, the mountains, and sakura blossoms, with the festival fun noises (a group of elderly people enjoying live enka performance)

Very cute wave-breaking blocks

The park has very friendly corvids (this is a very big boi)

The lunch is over, and we went back to the station to catch our train to Tokyo. Before we left, we have noticed a few curiosities!

Ladies toilet at the Aomori JR station has a urinal! It seems to be in a working order. Some say it is supposedly aimed at women wearing traditional Japanese clothing (kimonos 👘). It is far more likely that urinals might be of use to women with little children - using a urinal is easier than holding a child over an adult toilet and asking the child to "aim".

The "is for children" theory is corroborated with the baby holders in the cubicles. How are you going to look after your little one while you're on the toilet, right?! Simply clever.

Finally: the gacha machine at the station has tiny Shonen Jump comic books (?), among those is the world famous One Piece and less famous Witch Watch (currently airing on the TV).

🚄 Next destination: Tokyo - Ueno. The train takes over three hours, ideal for focused work.

Train snack: tamagoyaki (egg omelette), seaweed rice ball.

I hadn't check closely; lo and behold, for some reason they put gelatin in the egg omelette, so it's not vegetarian :/ ehhh... At least we're doing it not for religious reasons, so we're going to eat it, but we gotta be more careful next time.

Japanese train culture: alcohol during a train ride is A-OK.

On the photo: a small bottle saying お酒 ("o-sake", alcohol).

Ikebukuro at night is kind of cool...

There are no "fare zones" in the Tokyo metro. Each station has a specific fare, which requires a very complicated map with "it costs this much to get to that place".

Ikebukuro has maids on the streets who invite you to go to a "fun casino" where a drink costs as little as 1000 yen, and who knows how much money you'd leave there just for fun. Gambling is illegal in Japan, so it seems you just pay to play - poker, roulette, and so on.

But our gambling jam tonight is completely different!

Arcade machines. One game is 100 yen (a bit under $1), and you can play for about 5-10 minutes.

There are many, many, many different arcade machines

Step/dance machines are the loudest - you can't really wear headphones while dancing, can you?

In this arcade, most are rhythm games: hit the button at the right time. Dancing with your hands! But there are, of course, other arcade machines - fightings, racing games, you name it.

Gacha shops are everywhere. Maids with ads are everywhere, too. I guess it's a part time job that pays. Hopefully they don't have to deal with harassment (but they probably do...)

I think one of the awesomest things about Japan for me is that you can see references to characters that you love in everyday places. The characters that are virtually unknown outside of Japan, and are considered a niche interest, not just mainstream ones like Pokémon or One Piece. For example, a konbini had an opening from Horimiya playing. Or a gacha shop at the Aomori spring festival had a figurine from Lycoris Recoil as one of the prizes in the crane game.