Leaving Sapporo

I got up early on my last day in Sapporo. Hotel checkout was at 10AM and the coach I was taking to my next destination left at 1:00PM. Before then I wanted to visit a small town called Otaru.

This was the journey for the day.


Once checked out and on the train for Otaru I was bored. The journey was pretty unremarkable until the train came out of a tunnel and suddenly there was a beautiful view of the sea. It was blue, wide and still like an enormous flat sheet of glass stretching out from under the train.

Otaru’s train station is at the top of a gently sloping hill, which leads down to the sea. I bought some snacks from a convenience store and proceeded down to where I assumed there would be a bench and a view.

Neither of those things were present, factories and carparks took their place. That was disappointment number one.

I found a bench and ate my lunch next to one of the canals that Otaru is famous for. Here is a picture.


What you can’t see is how short these canals are - disappointment number two.

Here is the canal as viewed through some ornamental railings.


Further along were some old warehouses and a bank, but they weren’t that interesting.

By then I had decided go back to Sapporo, but stop along the way at one of the stations nearer to the sea.

On the way back to the station this restaurant and its interesting use for boat halves distracted me.




There was a 99yen shop outside the station that I hadn’t noticed. I know this might sound silly with us living in an age of guidebooks and GPS but I bought a compass. Well you know, you might have a map but you still don’t know which direction to go in. The compass I bought had the slight downside of using the Japanese symbols for its directions, so I was always a bit suspicious of which one was North.

Interestingly in the centre of the compass were twelve symbols that denote animals in the Chinese New Year. Each animal carries a directional meaning to it so that you can say, “Proceed rat for two kilometres and then veer snake. Our house is on the left.”

I got back on the train and then off again at a place right by the sea. I am not going to mention its name because it looks like this

And you should never go there.


Ever.


There was nothing there.



The only signs of life were some bikes.


It wasn’t possible to get down to the sea as it was fenced off. I stood on some rocks next to the fence and heard frantic scuttling.


Such was my introduction to sea cockroaches. The sea didn’t seem so beautiful anymore; I escaped on the next train.

The coach to Hakodate felt quite luxurious. Each row had only three individual seats with a lot of legroom. There was even entertainment in the form of Animal Planet and a documentary about the Oryx: this endangered chap.

It took five hours to get to Hakodate, the outskirts of which were all factories and gloom. The coach stopped amongst the factories and the name of the stop was suspiciously like the one I needed but I thought, “Well even if I am meant to get off here I still don’t want to.”

I got off outside the train station and went inside to the Tourist Information Office. An oldish man furnished me with a map and even drew an X where my hotel was; just 10 minutes walk up the road.

The road was a strange one. There was a female voice coming from everywhere, which made it very hard to place. Eventually I worked out that it was from a speaker system rigged all around the town. Most towns in Japan have these speaker systems; they act as a public address system for emergencies. In Hakodate though the locals have to put up with hearing songs, adverts and the woman talking as they go about their business.

I got to my hotel but I didn’t have enough cash to pay for my stay. The male and female team behind the desk looked rather unimpressed. I asked them if they took credit cards, they shook their heads and this time I was unimpressed.

One of the most technologically advanced countries in the world and yet they don’t do credit cards and their washing machines don’t heat the water. A minute later I was walking to 7/11 to use the ATM.

I returned to the hotel with cash in hand, the male and female team were smiling now.

I got another twinge of excitement as I opened the door of my home for the next two nights. The view was better than my last one, or maybe it was just that the street it looked out on to was more interesting. If I opened my window I could listen in to Hakodate FM.

A few hours later I walked around the darkened streets. I found a massive 99 yen shop and also the sea. There was a narrow back road running parallel to the sea and a large karate club. I sat on the low wall and ate some food until it started to get cold.

Back in my hotel room I watched some Japanese television and then went to sleep. I had a free breakfast to look forward to the next day.

Toyako

Four hours by coach away from Sapporo is a place called Toyako. This was where I was intending to go but getting in at 6AM from an Internet café does not help your chances of catching a 10:30 coach. Yet against all my own expectations I made it.
“You show me the ticket at the end,” said the driver who was less impressed with my achievement.

It is about time I supplied a map of Hokkaido to better illustrate my journey. This shows where I was heading, it was about 100KM away.


We stopped at a rest stop on the way. I bought some dry crackers which turned out to be pretty horrible, I carried them around in my bag for weeks after. This was the view from the rest stop, good isn’t it.


This is not Mt Fuji, it is just one of the many mountains in the Fuji style.

The lake I was heading to was in a national park redeemed for its beauty but this was not why I was going there. I wanted to go up a volcano and somewhere near the lake was a cable car which would allow me to do that just that. We don’t get to go up volcanoes at home, but we done have Lego land.

I got a few glimpses of the lake about 45 minutes before we reached our destination and it looked beautiful. As I was craning my neck to see the lake the coach was suddenly pulled over by a policeman.

The driver and policeman had a quick conversation and the coach quickly started off again. I noticed more policemen standing along the road but there seemed to be no explanation as to why they were there. It was the middle of nowhere.



The number of police standing beside the road increased as we went further. It was amazing, I had never seen so many policemen before.

And then the reason why became clear

Perched impressively on top of a hill was an enormous hotel. The hotel was surrounded by thick forest; not even the road leading up to it was visible. Its bare straight edged front gave it a powerful look like it was part of some great organism that slept beneath the hill. Crucially, though, I recognised the hotel from posters I had seen that week.

Unwittingly in my quest to ride a cable car up a volcano I had found myself at the venue for the G8 summit. In a week’s time the major leaders of the world would be in that hotel discussing global issues. This was why there were so many police lining the road.

I wanted to take a picture of all the police but you can’t really do that sort of thing can you. This was the best shot I got.


In Tokyo too the security had increased for the summit. I had first noticed it weeks before when I got off the bus to go to work and saw a big poster saying, "Counter Terrorism."

At that time Tokyo subway was littered with posters about increased security and at many of the major stations there was a greater police presence. Some policemen even took to standing on boxes so that they could look menacingly at more people at the same time.

I am not anti-establishment or anything but I don’t feel comfortable seeing armies of police around, it makes me nervous. Bored tyrants can always find some reason to stop you, I remember it happened to me once when I was on work experience.

I was at a school helping an IT technician out for a week. While crossing between classrooms on my own I got stopped and called over by a teacher. He looked at me and said, “What’s this?” he was indicating the blonde streak in my hair though it took me a moment to work that out.
“It’s a natural streak,” I explained.
He ruffled his brow over this but let me go. The thing was it was an Inset day and none of the kids were in school, so to him I was either a trespasser or on work experience, neither of which really warrants a hair inspection.

So that’s why police make me nervous.

Eventually we got to our destination, the small town of Toyako on the shores of Lake Toya.

I got off the bus and was immediately surrounded, by smiling Japanese women. They spoke English perfectly and I was completely unprepared for this; I hadn’t really used my voice at all that day and suddenly I was a celebrity.

My first instinct was to sap them for information and then escape. Once they had found out when the next bus to the volcano would be they offered me the chance to go to the Tourist Information Office. “You can try wearing a Yukata, The Japanese Tea Ceremony and Flower Arranging,” they said invitingly None of these activities really appealed to me but they were so earnest, and knew exactly how long I had to wait for my bus, that I agreed to go.

One lady with very good English took to me the Tourist Information Office. On the way she told me that she was an English teacher but had volunteered to be a guide during the summit.

“There are so many police around,” I commented.
“Yes, 20,000 have come here from all over Japan and I hear that in Sapporo you can’t use the lockers in the train stations.”
“What?” I said worriedly, I would be needing a locker in a train station the next day in between checking out and catching my coach. She turned out to be right about this and it was a real nuisance.

There were posters and decorations in the town, “It feels like a festival,” she explained. “We hope that after the G8 many people will want to visit Toyako.”


Indeed the town was on a tourist mission. The Tourist Information Office was surrounded by signs, balloons and posters. There was even a secondary Tourist Centre newly opened next door.

As we walked up the steps my guide seemed to run ahead of me slightly to warn everyone inside. Once I entered and saw the fifteen surprised faces it was obvious I had caused a stir. Everyone started assembling into their places and I was asked what I wanted to do. Like the macho guy I am I asked to do flower arranging but the woman in charge of that was out.

A few minutes later I was being given a private performance of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. In case you don’t know, the Tea Ceremony is like an elaborately refined dance which results in some tea. The arrangement of the equipment, the order and manner in which they are used all have to be painstakingly learnt. It is an extremely complicated, circumscribed and yet oddly beautiful way of making tea.

There wasn’t just one lady performing the ceremony though. Two women were playing instruments, another woman was sitting facing me and another served the tea and a bit of food.
“We normally use coal to heat the water,” I was told by one of the women, “but because of the G8 we are using an electric heater.” So the G8 was causing changes already.

At the end of the ceremony I was given an origami crane, “Take it back for your girlfriend,” they said, bowing politely. I put it safely in my bag.

My earlier guide was waiting for me and took me upstairs where there were some amazing pictures of Hokkaido. We took the moment to talk about politics.
“Your Prime Minister isn’t very popular at the moment,” she said about Mr Brown.
“No,” I agreed, “Do you like George Bush?”
“Not really. The French Prime Minister is quite popular because of his wife. I read in a magazine that she can’t come to the G8 because she is recording her new album. She must think that is more important than the G8.” My guide laughed.

On the way out a man appeared from nowhere to give me an enormous bag of goodies. Inside were five DVDs, three CDs, a selection of sweets, stacks of leaflets and a badge promoting Tokyo as Olympic City 2016.

Next door had displays of traditional crafts found in Hokkaido. A suit of traditional armour was part of the display and there were pictures of a yearly festival where it was still worn.
“That takes place in my hometown,” my guide told me, “but it is very boring.”
She didn’t quite have the right idea about promoting tourism but I appreciated her honest humour much more.

I mentioned being stopped by police in Sapporo airport to her and she said, “I am not surprised, you look like a protestor.” I was wearing shorts and t-shirt, I thought I looked like a tourist but she was adamant. That made me even more nervous.

She took me back to the bus station and that’s where we said goodbye. I caught the bus to the volcano and this place:



It was a tourist trap, full of souvenir shops and overpriced food.

I followed signs to the cable car station, but the silence and lack of other tourists gave me a worrying feeling.

A nice cat was lying outside the cable car ticket office. Inside, a man confirmed to me that the volcano was closed for the day. I went back to the cat.

I looked around the shops for a while, I didn’t buy any souvenirs but I found a White Bear skin on sale for 5000000 yen, that’s £25,000.



I bought some overpriced snacks and ate them while watching smoke rising from the volcano. The place smelt like ash, it had still been worth coming just for that.


An hour later the bus took me back into Toyako and I braved the mass of policemen in order to see the sights. Which included:

The lake.



Male and female swan boats.


Lanterns decorated by primary school children in environmental motifs.





Back at the bus station the friendly women had gone and it was just a dreary bus station again. I ate my free sweets and waited.

A coach with a sign for Sapporo turned up at the right time to pick me up. There were a few other people waiting for the coach and so I didn’t hurry to get on. When I stood to start making my way to the bus it pulled away. Panic filled me but I was too shy to start running and just walked quickly to try and catch the coach before it drove out the car park.

Without slowing down the coach proceeded out the car park and onto the road. I forgot shyness and ran after it full steam, it was the last bus to Sapporo and I was determined not to spend another night outside of my hotel.

There are few moments in my life where I find myself running as fast as I can, with utter commitment to the chase. It was like a movie; I was running across roads without looking, jumping over walls to cut corners and hearing my own theme music in my head.

I was catching up when the driver pulled over, he must have seen me in the mirror.
“Not this bus,” he told me.
“Oh, sorry,” I said panting for air.

I slinked back to the bus station and the crowd of people who had last seen me running for my life. I tried to project an air of nonchalance and with a slight forced grin at my own foolishness. The small group of passengers remained resolutely silent and I sweated on my own for a while. I could hear them though, in their minds saying, “I bet the French Prime Minister wouldn’t do that.”

Sapporo Nightview

I wanted to go and see the Sapporo nightview, that is the view of Sapporo at night from the top of a mountain. A cable car runs up the mountain to a viewing platform and a tram goes from the centre of Sapporo to the cable car station every ten minutes.

After working out how to use the trams, I got off the stop marked for the cable car. I found myself at a crossroads and the evening had gotten so late that I couldn’t even see where the mountain was anymore. There was a sign leading me down a street and then across a road but then it got a bit hazy. The road split into three directions with no signs at all.

The first direction I chose got my hopes up because there was a very brightly lit building that looked like it could be a cable car station. It wasn’t though; it was just some rich guy’s very brightly lit home in that modern cable car station design.

I went back and found the right way, but only after going down the other wrong one. All these roads had been quite steep and I was red faced and exhausted when I finally crawled up to the ticket window, peeling my discount coupon from my sweaty palm.

Every organisation, company or institute in Japan needs a fluffy mascot; there may even be a law about this. Sapporo cable car proudly mascotises (second use of that word on the Internet ever) itself as Morris:


The view was pretty nice from the top: all the lights of the city and beyond. I couldn’t take any good pictures though because I couldn’t hold my camera steadily enough.



I gave up and took extra shaky pictures instead.



As I was doing this a Japanese man said, “Hello.”
“Hello,” I replied.
“Where are you from?”
“The UK.”
“Oh.” Then there was a traditional moment of silence. “Take care.”
“Bye.”

He walked away and a woman he was with, who had been hidden behind him previously, gave me a nice smile.

There was a floodlight and I took pictures of my enormous shadow, well what would you do alone on the top of a mountain at night?


Getting back to the tram was much easier. I was first in line and hoping the tram would come soon as it was cold. The man and woman from the top of the mountain appeared and walked up the queue to where I was standing.
“Hello,” said the woman from before.
“You queue jumped!” I thought. “Hello,” I said.
“Do you remember us, from before?”
“Yes”
Her English was pretty good, better than the man’s had been. She mentioned to him that I remembered them and he made some noise of interest. Another man poked his head out, he was wearing glasses and I wasn’t sure if he was also in their group.

The woman asked me what I was doing in Japan and I told her about my trip. I said a few things in Japanese and the man started taking interest again. The bespectacled man also stuck his head out from the darkness a little more. A few minutes later the man, who was clearly the social leader, invited me to go for drinks with them. I said yes.

So who were these people? Well sadly I have forgotten their names so meet Mr Sociable, The Woman and Mr Glasses.

Mr Sociable: Came from a small island off the tropical island of Okinawa in southern Japan. He worked in a hotel with the other man and he liked to complain about the American troops based in Okinawa.

The Woman: From Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. She used to work in the hotel with the other two but left to go back to Kyushu.

Mr Glasses: He was the same age as me and from the same island as the other man. He did not say much, but we did have a conversation about Nintendo.

They were on a mini holiday together but were leaving the next day. I had an even earlier deadline though, my hotel closed its doors at midnight and it was already 9:30 when we got the tram.

They took me to a drinking place in the trendy area of Sapporo I had walked through earlier. They had been to the same place each night of their holiday and were now pretty familiar with the staff. We were taken up to the top floor, “I’ve never been up here before,” said the woman to me.

It was a nice place to drink; the walls were covered with drawings of famous icons like Godzilla, Astroboy and Akira Kurosawa. I broke the news that I was a vegetarian and they ordered some appropriate food for us to share.

They were overwhelmingly friendly; apparently the people from that island have a reputation for it. We talked about my trip and they recommended a few places to visit.

Me and the woman took this picture together.


Afterwards I shook hands with the two guys and then headed outside. The woman came with me making the staff puzzled as to why she was leaving so early. Back on the street she asked me to send her a picture of Hakodate nightview when I got there.

And then I ran I like the wind.

I’ve already said that Sapporo is built on the grid system making it easy to navigate, but somewhere in my haste I got confused. The massive university campus was refusing to be in the right place and pretty soon it was already midnight. I tried calling the hotel but there was no answer.

This might all sound like a bad thing but it did give me the perfect excuse to go to an Internet Cafe so in one way I was happy.

My legs limped me back into town, back past the roadworks and drunken revellers I had run past just minutes ago.

The subway was closing, the last commuters trickling home. I saw a policeman helping a very inebriated youth out of the subway lift. While the policeman descended back underground his previous burden walked in a daze across the road.

He headed straight for a wall and leant against it. His lean turned into a slow slide, he had fallen asleep while standing but somehow his limp body managed to sink itself comfortably to the floor without waking him up again.

Had it been 1983 and I was homeless for a night I don’t know what I would have done, mind you I would have been a foetus. The point is that these days £6 gets you a booth with the Internet, games, DVDs, a bathroom and free drinks. You can also sleep on the comfy leather chair in your booth, but for all the warmth and privacy there was I bet the guy outside slept better than I did.

First day in Sapporo.

So what does one do in Sapporo? Well, it has an amazing list of museums, and here it is:

The Bread Museum
The Chocolate Museum
The Beer museum

There are probably more museums than those three but they were the ones that really stuck out to me. I didn’t go to any of them though because museums can be dull, especially when you are on your own and especially when you can’t understand anything,

The University of Hokkaido was across the road from my hotel and I took a walk through its pleasant campus.

I was really impressed with a sign saying, “Institute of Meme Studies,” as there can’t be many signposts in the world baring the word meme. In case you don’t know, a meme is like a gene but for a thought, they can spread between minds just through language. The concept of a meme is itself a meme and they compete for survival in our heads, each striving for attention. The meme meme is feeling particularly smug with this paragraph.

It was pretty hot and I was walking down the long tree lined road at the university. I couldn’t get any idea as to the layout or size of the place; I just kept walking and eventually got to tennis courts and signs for agricultural areas. There was a stretch of grass with benches and I sat down.

In front of me was a woman sitting with her dog. She had her back to me and the dog was starring into the trees. There was something about the view that made me think it would make a wonderful photograph.

It didn’t.

There were plenty of pretty areas in the university, little streams and places to sit on the grass in the sunshine. Once I’d had enough I made my way out and headed through the main train station towards my next port of call, the Botanical gardens.

Being non-Japanese I headed straight for the man at the window of the little office to buy my ticket to the Botanical Gardens. He pointed to the machine opposite him where you were meant to buy the ticket first and then show it to him. He stamped my ticket, gave me a map and pointed the way. It seemed like machines don’t replace people in Japan, they just get the majority of the responsibility.

The Botanical Gardens were very extensive, even including a few small museums and historic buildings within the grounds. One museum was about the Ainu, a race of people who lived in Hokkaido having been driven out of the rest of Japan by another race of people. That other race was now what we think of as the Japanese, who had up until recently claimed that Japan was a homogenous society, but now admit to the Ainu’s existence as a different group of people. Great steps have been made since to preserve Ainu heritage, language and way of life from eradication. A book about Japanese etiquette I read puts the topic of the Ainu in a, “Never bring this up with a Japanese person” category but this paranoia if you as me.

The Ainu museum had lots of examples of tools, clothes and meaningful artefacts like this decorated turtle’s skull.


Upstairs was a an old video from early in the last century showing a bear tied to a post in the snow. The Ainu worship bears but this one was being taunted by a crowd of people standing around the post. Using sticks they were running forward and jabbing the bear making it run around the post trying to catch them. Actually it took me a while to work out that they were taunting the bear, at first I thought the bear was doing some kind of performance. The video took a sick turn when I saw the bear getting more exhausted and then limping as the crowd of people got more vicious. By the end of the video the bear was just a piece of meat roasting on a spit.

Every culture has mistreated animals, most still do. The way modern animals are slaughtered for meat in big steel factories is arguably less forgivable than what the Ainu were doing nearly a century ago. Still it had an effect on me: my interest in going to see the Ainu village outside of Sapporo melted and then evaporated.

Now having said all that I did visit another museum at the gardens that was full of dead animals. They had all been stuffed and put into lifelike poses, which seemed to be either cute or vicious. It can be pretty disturbing walking among carcasses, paused in their journey back into the soil. However, one cabinet of animals made me laugh. It was of mice, but they were completely flat like they had been run over. They weren’t just skins but whole mice as if the taxidermist had accidentally left them in his pockets before ironing his trousers. He’d probably tried to undo the damage by adding more stuffing, or trying to inflate the bodies up again with a foot pump, but to no success. Knowing that the museum had to have some mice he had perhaps claimed that it was the latest fashion in taxidermy, or that they were a special breed of low-mice adept at crawling without being seen; like soldiers on the battlefield.

As for the botany at the Botanical Gardens there was lots of it.

Including this.


It’s either the name of a flower or where they think John F Kennedy was laid to rest.


My next destination was at one end of the park I had been to the day before, the one with the TV tower at its centre. Here was an old European style building that used to be a Hall of Records or something.



Above the entrance was a face.

Next I walked through the park towards the TV Tower. On the way I bought a sandwich, with this curious label.


A cute dog was playing with a ball while I ate my sandwich.


In the TV tower I bought a ticket to ride the lift to the top floor. In Japan all lifts in tall buildings are manned by female attendants who deliver a speech perfectly timed to end just when the lift reaches its destination. No one listens to the speech but the timing is appreciated. Here is a video of my ascent up the tower and you can hear the attendant giving her speech, though she cheats a bit by talking very slowly.



I really like the shadows you get to see from tall buildings, for example.



You can also see how the park cuts through the city.



On the way down I saw some Royce cookies, and this reminded me of something Yoko had said. She had told me that Royce were only available in Hokkaido, so they were a bit of a luxury in the rest of Japan. Her recommendation was a snack that looked like Pringles, but where one side was covered in chocolate and the other left salty like a crisp. I took her advice and bought a box for myself.

In the garden of another European style building I found a great picnic spot, it was under a _ and next to a beautiful pond.





The Royce snacks were really stupendously good. They were practically addictive and I got through the whole box in about twenty minutes. I could only assume that the company only operate in Hokkaido because they are too busy eating their own products to expand into the rest of Japan.

As I munched and watched the ducks I noticed that there was a man on the other side of the pond pointing his camera at me. To be fair he could have been taking pictures of the pond and the ducks but I looked right at him and kept munching so that at least I would come out as slightly more aware than the ducks when his picture, “The Grazing White Man,” was finally developed.

Also in the garden was a bizarre kind of blossom that felt just like fluff when I touched it.




Inside the building were long streams of origami cranes.



Something else to mention was this special Hokkaido shaped clock counting down the days to the G8.


At that time of day I had a shadow, but considering where the sun was the shadow was not falling in the right direction. Wondering why this was, I noticed that the light casting it was not from the sun directly but a reflection of the light from a nearby building. These things impress me.

I went back to my hotel room for a nap; I needed my energy for scaling a mountain that evening.