Laugh at the funny pictures or suffer the consequences.

No post tonight, my brain is tired. 

Instead you get this.

A deer attempting to eat metal.

A totem pole of robots.



A misogynist bar.



An actual record found in an actual shop in Shibuya.
(Obviously German beer drinking music was popular enough to warrant a sequel)



The most unappealing Italian restaurant ever.



RanDOM ENglisH CapitALIsAtioN



Something highly disturbing from Shinjuku.



And the most excited shoe shop you have ever seen.


and frankly you should be thankful you even get that.

Kit-Kat K-K-K-Kombo!

I’m back.


Sorry for my absence. My parents came to stay with me for three weeks and that coupled with the need to clean the house before their arrival has meant that I have had absolutely zero time for blogging whatsoever.

However, I am now energised with hundreds of pictures and stories and the amount of content on this site is set to skyrocket.

Not today though, today I am tired, so we’ll be going back to an old favourite.

Yes, it’s time for me to review some kit-kats.



First up is the most normal of today’s contenders a dual pack of kit-kat minis; white peach and peach.

The packaging is nothing particularly special and not particularly well done although the peach illustration is nice. Having said that; peach kit-kats don’t seem as out there as watermelon or tea so they probably need less eye catching packaging.

So how do the flavours stack up?

Well peach is delicious. Even the smell is really overtly peachlike. Like all the fruit kit-kats the initial taste isn’t too fruity but there is a strong peach quality to it and the after taste is very strong. It’s a nice complex flavour too and not too sweet. Overall I’d say this was a real homerun for kit-kat.

White peach doesn’t fare quite so well. It doesn’t smell or taste as strong as peach. In fact it is a little bland. It is very creamy though and there are definite fruity notes to it. On its own this wouldn’t be too bad but it stacks up poorly next to peach.

Next we’re onto a pair of drink based kit-kats in the standard Japanese packaging (i.e. 4 finger split into 2 packs of 2) Espresso coffee and Jasmine Tea.



Espresso Coffee has great packaging with a delicious and inviting looking picture of an espresso and some funky swirls and dark notes. It all seems very jazzy. I approve.

I can’t really make up my mind about espresso. On the one hand it in no way shape or form tastes as strong as an espresso coffee. In fact the first few bites are almost totally tasteless. However once you get into it a really, really strong coffee flavour starts to emerge with a lovely aftertaste. I wouldn’t call this an espresso coffee, unless you drink espresso with about 4 sugars, but it is nice.



Jasmine has really cool packaging that is very over the top. Not only is it green and pink (the Japanese colours of spring) but it has tiny flowers on it and an inviting cup of jasmine tea complete with pot! Totally irony free this one, it wants you to feel all springy and by god you will feel springy. I should also mention that I am not allowed to throw away this packet because it has the kanji for jasmine written on it and these are the same kanji that appear in my girlfriend, Mariko’s, name. So she wants to carry it around and show it to random Japanese people.

I was surprised at the colour. Rather than being a white or off-white tea colour it was in fact chocolate coloured. And the taste is distinctly odd. Not unpleasant but very odd. It tastes of both chocolate and jasmine tea at the same time. In fact the jasmine tea flavour is uncanny, particularly the aftertaste. The flavour is a little bit too busy for me personally but they delivered exactly what they promised.



Now onto the truly oddball offers. These are a pair of kit-kats that can only be bought at Tokyo station. They come in a special kind of display package so you can give them to co-workers as gifts, a common practise in Japan known as omiyage.



The writing is all in Japanese in florid letters that I cannot decipher so the flavour could in fact be anything. In fact our brief attempt at decoding it came up with the flavour “shoyu,”… which means soy sauce.

Soy sauce kit-kats? Well, I’ll try anything once.

It is white.

The smell I cannot place.

Ah, it is soy sauce.

Technically it is sweet soy sauce, which is still soy sauce but Japanese people do use it as flavouring for sweets such as dango. I’m not hugely keen on it and my first bite of this was a little weird but actually they’re rather nice. They taste mostly of burnt caramel with a slight sour note and a little bit of a salt note. This means they have a really rich and complicated flavour that hits all the areas of your mouth at once. They’re sweet but not too sweet, a little bitter, a little sour and a little salty. Consequently they are really, really more-ish. A surprising success I’d say.



The next one we literally had no idea what to expect. Our best guess was mushroom but we weren’t nearly as sure as with the soy sauce guess.

I literally have no idea what it is meant to taste like but it does taste nice. It is mostly chocolaty and very, very salty. In fact it is the saltiest kit-kat I think I have ever eaten. There is also a very strong umami feeling (the fifth taste and a big focus of Japanese cooking) and a very complicated rich indefinite note as well. Curiously it lacks a strong after taste, something that flavoured kit-kts tend to have. Frankly I find it too weird and ephemeral to be a big hit but it isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination.

Suma Dera Temple

I've written about Sumadera before. It's a local temple near the beach in Kobe. Although it is apparently historically important I have never seen it in any kind of write-up or guidebook before. This is a shame because it's one of my all time favourite temples. It's really quirky and full of unusual little things that I have never seen at another temple. It's big too and thus it&s very easy to spend an entire afternoon wandering around and marvelling at all the cool things.



Since I've already posted some stuff about it this post is mostly just to show off some pictures that I didn't show last time. So enjoy the wholly unique Sumadera.



Even statues get cold.



Is that a Buddha with…balloons???



This wall was very cool. It was entirely composed of these plates featuring sculpted images of Buddha.



And here we have a rock.

A big holy rock.

And some kind of mace.

No idea.



One thing I missed when I went to the temple the last time was all the intricate carvings on the roofs and ceilings of the temple. Some of these are amazingly detailed.





The eyes are made of glass.



Sumadera was the scene of a famous battle between two Samurai clans. These statues depict a famous moment in that battle. Suma, the beach, has been the subject of more than a few great pieces of Japanese literature, including “The Tale of Genji.” Genji is probably the most famous and important piece of literature in Japan (as well as being the world’s first novel) so one of these days I should probably read it. I particularly like the waves and sand created by painting gravel.



There was lots of plum blossom in the temple garden which is always welcome.



Very cool pagoda. Quite newish I’m guessing.



An actual lion. Not a lion dog but an honest to god lion.

Bizarre!



Ah, a lion-dog. Back to normal then.




Ah I remember him. The most phallic head I have ever seen.






More lion-dogs and this time a really bizarre one. I’m getting a distinctly Indian vibe from it.



These two bears are grave markers for a kid’s grave. Whenever anyone walked past them they played a song.

Nagahama Part 2: Uncontrollable Gushing

Let me just preface this entry by saying that I have finally, after months and months, got around to fixing my laptop. Now, almost half of the problems are gone (I still need a new battery) and no more will it interfere with my attempts to blog. And yes, computer problems are to blame for my inability to blog on Thursday and Friday.

So on that happy mood lets talk about Nagahama, the town.



Nagahama, as I mentioned in the last post, is on the shores of lake Biwa, Japan’s biggest lake. From the perspective of the shore side it may as well be the sea because the waters completely envelop the horizon. Even the mountains on the other side are dim and hazy. Were it not for the lack of waves and the plentiful ducks it would be just like the seaside.

Being British, and at the seaside, my urge was to have a picnic and so lunch was sushi, eaten in a park overlooking the lake and accompanied by local beers from the Roman microbrewery. And it was practically perfect.
For those beer fans amongst you I can’t wholly recommend the Roman brewery. All their options were quite nice but a bit tart with a strong fermenting taste left over to them; A flavor that I associate more with my Dad’s homebrew than a professional outfit. The white beer was very nice though, crisp and refreshing with a complex palate.



The park itself was the reclaimed grounds of the old castle.

I was stunned that such a tiny little town had a castle! Although it was only a small one I guess. But still an honest to god castle, although sadly a replica. Apparently the lakeside towns were involved in many minor disputes since it was such a good fishing site so all these small towns in Biwako have castles.
More surprising than the castle though was the architecture of the town. Nagahama apparently used to be a major centre for glass production in Japan and a lot of foreigners came here during the Meiji-restoration period to teach glass blowing skills to the Japanese.

Because of this the town has a really unusual architectural style that has really clear Victorian influences. I’ve already mentioned the train station, the oldest continually operating one in Japan, which seems to have been transplanted wholesale from a small town just outside Leeds and dumped in the middle of the Japanese countryside. It’s startlingly incongruous even in a country that thrives on incongruous images.



This approach extends to the whole town and it produces some really weird effects. The main shopping area is known as “Black Square” (Kurokabe) and it contains all the glass production centres along with many other touristy and crafty shops. Kurokabe is every inch the Victorian arcade. It wouldn’t look out of place in Leeds. Yet there is Japanese art hung everywhere and at one end of it there is an ancient and enormous Buddhist temple.



There were also ancient “storehouses” dating back to the pre-restoration period dotted around the town. These are a rare sight anywhere in Japan since space is at a premium and dedicating it to useless wooden structures seems a waste. But these storehouse were very cool looking. Essentially imagine a siege tower but built into the corner of a wall. It’s wooden and thin but much taller than all the surrounding buildings. Again, the incongruous nature of these ancient buildings sitting next to what looked like Victorian streets was utterly strange.



Just off one corner lay an open area with a collection of craft shops. These were selling some of the most bizarre things, from girl’s festival dolls, to home made hello kitty chairs, to telescopes and even small home made toys. But most surprising and inviting of all was this.



A giant outdoor kaleidoscope. Basically it was a big tent with a stained glass window at the top, a mirror and a handle to turn the glass. It wasn’t the most impressive sight I’ve ever seen but it was free and just randomly here for enjoyment.
The whole town seemed full of quirky little surprises everywhere we looked. There was the anglophile tearoom called “London Antiques” complete with real antiques that came from practically everywhere in Europe except London it seems. There was the gorgeous and picturesque river running through the square. There was this frankly bizarre looking samurai and so many more surprises like this.



Frankly the most surprising thing was this;



a museum dedicated to the toy manufacturer Kaiyodo. Kaiyodo will be most famous to American nerds for producing the revoltech line of figures. Now I have to stress here, Nagahama is a small place and hard to get to. It has a historic glassmaking area and some wonderful plum trees but it is hardly the ideal tourist spot. So why put a toy museum here? Kaiyodo is neither from Nagahama nor based there so what was this mysterious museum doing here? Maybe, like me, the owners of Kaiyodo had just been swayed by the sheer strangeness of the place.



Sadly time did not permit me to explore the museum, but I did get a photo of a dinosaur made of dinosaurs.





Finally we hit up the historic glass making part of town to watch someone blow glass (which is always amazing to watch but I have seen it before) and then into a glass shop to look at sculptures. Again the strange European vibe continued as Fran and I met another Gaijin, a foreigner, living in this small town…who didn’t speak English. She was Italian and working in the glass shop.



The shop was amazing of course showing off many styles, colours and products including stuff made there and stuff imported from Italy. Including real Venetian masks.



Of particular interest were the specialty pieces such as this amazing violin.



Being Japan of course artistic representations of fish were common.





Sadly, due to the long journey we had to make home we had to leave Nagahama before I really felt I had explored it. But even the small time I spent there caused me to fall utterly in love with the place. It is so bizarre and so unlike anywhere else in Japan. A tiny town, seemingly dominated by art and beauty over any real business or farming, smack dab in the centre of the countryside miles from the coast and yet with one of the most palpable European feels of any city in Japan.



I think I loved it more because I discovered it. Nagahama is listed in the guidebook I use, but only briefly. And whilst they did mention the storehouses, the castle and the kaleidoscope; the Hello Kitty chair, the toy museum and the weird samurai were all discoveries I made on my own. I feel weirdly protective of the place. I loved that everything there surprised me so much and that I went there expecting so little and came back with so much.

I think it may just be my favourite place in Japan.