better, rather than

One of the things I'm still missing pretty severely is the food - really everywhere, not just Yokohama and Tokyo. I expected all the Japanese food to be better, of course, and it was - for example, the cluster of restaurants at the train station had a sushi-train restaurant which served sushi of quality much better than that of cheap-but-good sushi here. It wasn't I ♥, but it was within range given the limited palette, and, of course, that was cheap sushi. Meanwhile, the cooked fish lacked some taste that I really dislike in cooked fish throughout North America, and while it still wasn't my favourite thing in the world, it was something I was perfectly happy to eat.

I didn't really expect the western food also to be better, as a rule. The sandwich and fries I had at Anna Miller? Really good. Good cold cuts, good bread, an unexpected but very good mayonnaise relish that I've no idea how to duplicate that was tasty without being heavy like I usually find mayonnaise to be. It came with french fries. They were solid but light and tasty, despite being deep-fried.

That became a recurring theme, really; a lot of American foods, particularly cheaper American foods, are heavy with fats and grease. While actual meats served in Japan tended to be very fatty cuts - particularly the night I tried 牛どて鍋, which is, hum, a country beef single-pot pie-like dish - you never found much of anything heavy with oil or grease (or, I suppose butter), like all fast foods, most sandwiches, french fries, and so on. I liked that a lot.

Actually, let me just me come out and say it: food was all but uniformly better than here. In a lot of cases, dramatically. Quality of ingredients showed. Everywhere but the first stop when we joined up with the Thundering Hoarde tour already in progress was at least really good. That first lunch with the group was a very western lunch aimed at reassuring a very western group of tourists, and it was mediocre, but even the tour food improved quickly. And more specifically, even the western-oriented tour food - which shrank in proportion as time went on - improved just as quickly.

I don't quite know how to drive this home with clarity. How about this: we stopped at a rest station - a combination rest stop and truck stop - on the highway between tour visits one day. I got a curry from the short-order counter, and it was good. Rest stop curry - actively good.

(Oh, there was another exception: one night we needed Food Now, and Paul and Anna dove in to an egg, italian sausage, rocket, and anchovy pizza, which I avoided for the spaghetti. I chose poorly. Amusingly, I was able to recreate what I think they were going for last night. It came out nice.)

Even things like candy-bar chocolates are better. Counter chocolates are generically of better quality than you get here without going to specialty shops. One of the reasons for the Pocky phenomenon, I rather suspect, is that the chocolate is simply much better than you get in, say, a Snickers bar, and people are reacting to that. Apparently some people think it's dark chocolate - it's not, at least, not in the standard box. But it's got a lot more flavour per volume than people expect, so they think it must be dark. iirc, "Men's Pocky" actually is dark chocolate, if you're curious.

Similarly, soft-serve ice cream - you know, the swirly kind you think of as fun in the summer but not really a good example of the art? It's just good ice cream in Japan. Very good, in fact. I particularly liked the sesame that Mariko introduced to me (so tasty!), but plain vanilla? Also very good. I was pleased to discover today that Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream bars are, in fact, of reasonably comparable quality to the soft serve vanilla - not quite as good, frankly, there's a bit of a hollowness to the taste that I can't figure out, and the chocolate shell isn't everything I'd like it to be, but it's still good. This means I'll have at least some ice creams that I can buy at a counter which aren't a big letdown. Of course, the selection is far less than I had in Japan in, say, in an ordinary ice cream vending machine, but what can you do? At least there's something.

I'm going to have to get serious about learning the art of bento. I can usually stomach airline food, but I seriously and honestly could not eat what United put in front of me on the flight home. It was appalling. But I don't think it was any worse than what I scarfed down on the way there.

Fundamentally, the way that American culture prefers "more" over "good" shows up exquisitely in food. Despite the fact that American food has improved dramatically over the last 50 years, it's still kinda crap. Fatty, sloppy, oversweetened crap, made as cheaply as possible and served by the bucketload, as though to pigs.

This quality emphasis doesn't mean limited choices, by the way. I ran into far more variety there than here. Some of it was scary variety, like HELLO JELLYFISH but! Variety.

Japan is already famous for its vending machines, of course. I don't need to go on about that too much. But in case you're not aware: they are, of course, AWESOME. (Sorry, return of t3h c4pz.) Even in a single smallish drink machine in an alley, you're looking at 20 options - soda, teas, lemon drinks, waters, coffee, vitamin waters, juices, electrolyte waters (like the well-known Pocari Sweat, which I was drinking already before I went over on vacation - it's like Gatorade, sweet, but not sickly sweet, I really like it) - often in two sizes, and the cans have lids you can put back on so you can save some for later. Also, the machines generally seem to come in clusters of three or so, without a lot of repeats.

This is as opposed to a US soda machine, with its four slots filled with Coke or Pepsi, and four other options. Maybe.

Pleasantly, I've found I can get C.C. Lemon at Uwajimaya. I got hooked on that stuff in Yokohama, and it's everywhere. Also, mmmm, tasty. This is particularly good because I tried a lemon drink at QFC a couple of days ago - an all-organic "alternative" kind of drink - and like all kinds of other things now, it mostly tasted like sugar water. I could taste lemon in it, but it was kind of drowned out by the sugar rush. So I poured it out. (They didn't have any Limonata or I'd have tried that. I still plan to try it again. Hopefully that's still good.)

So anyway. Food in Japan: overwhelmingly better. Not universally, but overwhelmingly; Japanese food, western foods, whatever. Better.

But then, on the other hand, they do also have things like this:


Admiral Cheesehead's Orange Fleet Opens Namjatown
(spazzkat's picture)

Nobody's perfect. -_^

oh good, i need some ice cream

spazzkat pointed out that I did in fact have a vending machine picture, so I'm posting it as an addendum here!


Even the Coke machine

getting around

Everybody talks about the Japanese train system. I have to say it's for damned good reason. They're fast, they're pleasant, they're on time; what else could you want?

Oh, I know - how about comfort, and room? Everybody knows how packed Japanese trains are, right?


How About That Legroom?

That's on a しんかんせん７００, the highest-speed class of "bullet train" currently running. (They have faster ones in testing now.) Note how Anna has her bag in front of her instead of in the overhead racks, or the luggage storage areas at the back of each car. Note also that the train is in motion, and I'm standing, taking pictures. What you can't see is that I could have stood up in front of my own seat and been at full height, or that this is ordinary class, not a green (first class) car. And it wasn't a reserved car saved for us. We had ordinary seat assignments, but that was it.

Here's what it looks like out a window of one of these trains. I don't know whether we were at top speed when I took this shot; the comfort level of the ride didn't really change with speed. The occasional vertical blinky blurs going by horizontally are utility poles.

Note how much quieter it is than an airplane. Note also that you can walk back to the bathrooms, complex of vending machines, or other cars at any time. Note that we didn't have to arrive at the station two hours in advance, and that we just walked onto the train. I spent some time updating my print journal while on the ride; it's far smoother than air travel, and while there are seatbelts they encourage you to use, they're optional.

We rode a 500 series - slower than the 700, but still high-speed - away from Tokyo ahead of the typhoon. Here's video of Anna updating her journal on the 500 during the ride through the leading edges of a typhoon. On the 500, it just seemed like another rainy day.

But it's not just the しんかんせん lines. The ordinary JR lines are also very comfortable. Not nearly as fast, of course, and on some lines the rails aren't welded - but even on those, there's not really much of the clacky-clacky noise. And below that, the light rail - those are more like a subway (side-seats only, lots of standing room), but again are 1. quiet, 2. clean, 3. on time, and 4. easy to figure out once you understand how the maps work. And everywhere, at least in and near the cities.

Our JR Rail run to Kansai Airport was three minutes late to the station due to weather. They issued apologies over the PA system while the cleaning crew did a mid-day spot-check clean of some of the cars. We got to the airport on schedule, to the minute. Oh, and by the way, they're good at stops and starts, like you'd want - there's nothing jerky about anything.


JR Rail to Kansai Airport, at station

I do want to say that the Seattle bus tunnel - at least, pre-closing, I've no idea what it'll be like under Sound Transit management - was one of the few transport hubs I've seen comparable to the nice Japanese subway stations. Hopefully ST won't screw them up. Sadly, here, they're the exception, and not at all the rule; I'd like to change that. Interestingly, they're also similar in that the individual stations tie several otherwise-independent blocks of retail together, with entry directly into those complexes. In particular, the bottom level of Westlake and the corresponding entry point to Westlake Station is probably the most Japan-like moment of transit station I've seen here. Add the ticket gates and it could be part of the system. Perhaps if I ever write fantasy fiction, I can have it be simultaneously a Sound Transit line station and a みなとみらい line stop. A transfer point between Seattle and Yokohama rails. There's even a Daiso on that level. It'd be great.

If only.

But back on topic. Rails met and exceeded all expectations, except for crowding. Those crowds you hear about certainly do exist, but not nearly to the extent suggested, and are a rush-hour phenomenon. I never saw it, but my friend Mariko told me they're real - mostly on the ring line in Tokyo, maybe, but real.

As with the food, though, there was a surprise: Japanese roads are also better. Smaller, sure. Much better sidewalked where appropriate, of course. And far fewer of them are really primarily intended for cars - most of the side-streets are pedestrian-first, cars certainly can and do come through but they need to be careful and slow. But the highways and major arterial routes - the car routes - are much smoother than here, and, accordingly, the bus rides are smoother and quieter. Not traffic-jam free, of course; our bus from Narita to Yokohama took almost twice as long as it should have, thanks to Tokyo rush hour traffic, and it was far and away the worst part of the trip, and pretty much the only portion I didn't enjoy. (We should have taken the train, but I didn't have that figured out yet. Now I do.) But at least the roads were smooth.

Getting back here - and onto 99 - reminded me of the time Anna's Norwegian pen-pal Yngvar flew in for a visit; we picked him up from the airport, and on the trip to Murkworks North, he was curious about the pavement treatment Seattle apparently used on I-5 to slow traffic down by making the ride have a strange vibration to it. "No," I said, "the roads just suck." Yngvar said, "...oh." and didn't bring it up again. I further speculate that someone from Japan would have had the same reaction. We may have a lot more roads than either of those countries, but they aren't really very good. "More," again, rather than "better," on roads. And both less - much less - and dramatically lesser on rail.

And even with really good roads, I prefer the trains. Somehow, I think the Japanese do, too:


Hato Bus