Day 15

We got up and decided to make a day trip to Kobe. I wanted to see the Sake breweries and learn a bit about how it's made. So we boarded a few trains and headed for Sannoimya in central Kobe. We ate half a 'delicious bread' (bread with sugar on) each for breakfast on the trains. We got there and wandered about in search of a tourist information centre. We found one and followed the map guidance to our first destination: Sawa no tsuru, a brewery and sake museum.

We inevitably got lost and took a 45 minute detour around the modern functioning harbour. It was windy, and threatened to rain. We walked on paving past fast roads and wharfs with tugboats dragging larger boats with steel ropes, over a suspension bridge and, eventually, back on track to our first destination.

Sawa no tsuru, contrary to the advice of wikitravel, did not have a great deal of information in English, and the English leaflet provided only covered the broadest of strokes. While certain aspects of the process were fairly self explanatory (like rice washing/steaming), others were more cryptic (rice polishing?).

Giant vats for steaming and storing rice

The gift shop was better, however. Free tasting of one sake was offered. It was good, quite clean and simple tasting. I like that. A Junmai Daiginjo I wanted to taste wasn't free however, and I bought a glass for 500Y (~4 pounds). Fruity! and smooth, as Daiginjo's often are (which explains their price tag). Very good, but not quite good enough to persuade me to buy the bottle for 40 pounds.

We headed out and off to our next destination: the Hakutsuru brewery. This name might ring a bell for some English readers. Hakutsuru is one of the more prominent internationally known brewers (check the name on that bottle you were given as a gift but never opened ;-) ). Walking through the wind and, now also, rain towards the local train station I was conscious of the mild inebriation I was under, having not had much breakfast, and having had two 'shots' of (16-18% spirit). Not a problem, but I probably shouldn't drive.

We made our way through the miserable weather and eventually, after getting lost again, found the Hakutsuru brewery. It was set up in much the same way as the Sawa no tsuru brewery, except that tv screens with buttons labeled 'English' were present. This made the tour much more meaningful. The videos had a set formula in which they described each brewing process in chronological order; first outlining the traditional method, and then explaining the modern way to (mass) produce the same result. Of course regardless of the process, the modern solution was almost always "nowadays we put it in a stainless steel container and a machine does it". Still very informative though. Making sake the traditional way was unbelievably hard and painful work because it could only be done during the winter months (the rice needed to be kept in the cold). This meant running hands and feet through freezing cold water as well as constantly kneading and stirring doughy mixtures of rice and Koji (a bacterium).

There was another free shot of sake to taste at the end. As I suspected would be the case, I was not a fan of the Hakutsuru sake. It had a strong and unpleasant aftertaste at the back of my tongue.

Sake based moisturisers. One of them is called "Rice Beauty, Dramatic Repair".

We left and by now I was starting to get very hungry indeed. We headed back to Sannomiya to look for a food venue. It seems to me that restaurants work slightly differently in Japan. They tend not to open until around 4pm, and they are often positioned all in one place in a city (sometimes all on the same street). So we wandered aimlessly in search of that one, special street only to find that restaurants weren't ready to open. We settled for a chinese restaurant in a shopping mall (such venues don't abide by these rules because they have to close earlier, i.e. when the mall closes). Mediocre but reasonably priced rice, ramen, and gyoza made up our lunch.

The weather still being miserable, we decided to abandon going to Meriken park in Kobe, and caught a train back to Osaka with the intention of going to the Kaiyukan (Osaka aquarium). After various changes we arrived at Sakurajima (same name as the volcano!) station. We headed towards the aquarium to find that we were on the wrong 'island' (the bay area has a few artificial islands). As we discovered this, however, we stumbled across a passenger ferry and decided to give it a shot. Not clear on the price, times, or general procedure for using the ferry, we waited with cyclists who seemed to be queuing. The ferry arrived and we boarded. The captain piloted the ferry like a motorcycle, lots of power and little finesse, so the journey was short but fun. We arrived at the correct island for free and, passing by a large Ferris wheel and amusement arcade, purchased our tickets for the aquarium.

I have to say that the aquarium was pretty amazing. I guess the London Aquarium is my only point of comparison, but the Kaiyukan was worlds apart. Famous for having a whale shark, we were disappointed to find that the whale shark has been moved to the kochi prefecture, and replaced by a shoal of sardines. While a shoal of sardines is nowhere near as impressive as a whale shark, sitting and watching the flocking algorithm at work in a shoal is incredibly hypnotic. The main tank of the aquarium is incredibly large and the whole building is effectively a spiral ramp around it. The tank is full of a variety of fish including sharks and rays. This mixes things up nicely when the shoal explodes into a torus to flee from the periodic intrusion of a diving shark.

Come on guys, work together and you can look just like a whale shark!

Windows 9 desktop background

After a few hours I had exhausted the memory on my camera and we left, homeward bound. Walking past the arcade I noticed two machines labelled 'Metal Gear Arcade'. Big fans of the series we had to give them a try. We donned the cool 3D glasses, adjusted the microphone, wielded the fake SMGs, and... worked our way through a dozen menu screens in Japanese. Damn Konami do not understand what an arcade game is. When we finally got into the game it turns out to be a 3D shooter with the camera controlled by head motion. It takes a little bit of getting used to but is pretty fun.

Take that you sons of... the patriots. Who doesn't love a good MGS pun?

We finally made our way back to the hostel by a different route (there was a train line on the correct island too). I got pretty hungry again so we nipped out to what was described to me as a 'korean izakaya'. Not a bad description. An elderly Korean couple that spoke little English were running the joint. We ordered a couple of beers and I pointed at a picture of something that looked interesting and had a fried egg on top (a pretty common sight in Japanese restaurants).

The lady brought our beers and also brought 'Se-bi-su'. Yay! more free stuff! It was a red stringy thing which was a little spicy and coated in a sticky sesame sauce. Delicious. I asked her 'nan desu ka?', and she told me it was 'Kankoku Kimchi'. Korean Kimchi. Not a description which I found very helpful at the time. A subsequent wiki tells me that it was some kind of vegetable. My rice, bacon, egg, and vegetable spicy okonomiyaki-like thing arrived and we dug in! Awesome.

Now it's late and I need some sleep. The incessant bleeping of the nearby train station kept me from getting much last night. Why did we leave the window open!? Baka! Tomorrow: Nara and the famous Todaiji hall!

Take care folks!