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Days 14-16 - Nagoya
Since I start work on Monday, Marlena and I decided to go on a trip outside of Tokyo while I still have time. Destination: Nagoya!
Hi, It's Marlena. Since Jesse's working now, I'm going to help with some of the writing too. My stuff will be in blue! (if the colours make it difficult to read for any reason let us know)
Shinkansen - Bullet Train
Don't mind me being utterly clueless in the foreground lol.
Part of why Jesse chose Nagoya is because we could take the high-speed bullet train, known here simply as the Shinkansen. He bought our tickets online, and then linked them to our PASMO (IC) cards, so when we arrived at Tokyo Station we simply followed the signs for the Shinkansen in the right direction, and tapped our passes at the electronic turnstiles just as we do for the subway or busses. However, while usually we only tap our passes on and off for the subway, this time the turnstiles spit out our tickets with the train time and seat selection for us to take with us.
Having easily found the platform (there is excellent signage in all the stations in our experience) we walked the length of the train and scoped out the vending machines. The platforms are busy places! Vending machines, corner stores, and even standing-room-only restaurants are between the platforms, not to mention all the people. The trains come and go more quickly than I expected, and are so long that if you're at the front you can't see the last car at the other end of the gently curved platform. They move a truly impressive amount of people.
Shortly after we were settled in our seats we set off, right on time of course. We made a couple extra stops at stations on our way out of Tokyo to pick up extra passengers, and then we were properly on our way to Nagoya. It was amazing watching our speed to tick up on Jesse's watch! It feels rather different to taking the train back home. The acceleration is more intense and lasts longer, but the ride is smoother. The world kept flying by faster and faster, until our speed hovered around 280 km/hr. You don't notice the incline when the train turns unless you've slowed down to stop at a station, and I popped my ears a lot as we went through the mountains. The pressure was honestly a little uncomfortable when we passed another Shinkansen going in the opposite direction in a tunnel, but overall it was quite a good ride! And just over an hour and a half to comfortably travel what takes over 4 hours in a car. I loved seeing more of the countryside and it has encouraged me to be sure we get out of Tokyo soon enough.
Miso Katsu
One of the specialty foods in Nagoya is called "Miso Katsu", basically a sauce made from fermented soybeans over breaded and fried pork. It is a bit expensive, but very tasty!
Our food was brought to our table by this Robot!
Miso Katsu in the center, with some salad and mashed potatoes. Side dishes are: Miso Soup, 2 types of Pickles and Rice. Yum!
Sky Promenade
Jesse did most of the research to find what we should see in Nagoya, and he was quite excited to go up the Midland Square Open-Air Observation Platform Sky Promenade at night. It's a walkway on the 46th to 44th floors of the building, putting you about 220 meters up. While he loved being so high up, personally I am much less a fan of heights so I stuck to the inside of the walkway away from the windows, while he happily took photos. It was quite the view, even if my knees disagreed. ;)
A cool part of the experience is that the roof was open-air. In certain sections, you could really feel the wind blow!
Yellow Tomato
After a good look around from up high we walked around a bit to explore Nagoya. It feels a little different than Tokyo, despite still being the 3rd largest city in Japan. The sidewalks are much wider, and noticeably less crowded. There seemed to be more space for cars too, with wider lanes that took slightly longer to walk across.
As we walked back to our hotel, we passed a place called the Yellow Tomato. If you haven't seen the photos below already, what kind of foods do you suppose are served at an establishment called the Yellow Tomato? Salads? Maybe vegan fare?
How about delicious parfaits made by an older gentleman?
(Honestly, often the English on signs and especially shirts leaves me utterly baffled, but the parfait was amazing!)
Nagoya Castle - Honmaru Palace
The next morning after a sluggish start (catching up on sleep), we set off for Nagoya Castle. Geographically, Nagoya is located roughly halfway between Tokyo (the current capital) and Kyoto (the former capital) so naturally Tokugawa Ieyasu decided it would be a good spot to build a castle in 1610 when he was invested as Shogun. Unfortunately the main castle is not open for tours for August, likely due to renovations, but we were able to tour Honmaru Palace.
Honmaru Palace served as the official residence and administrative offices of the Owari Tokugawa clan and is a truly gorgeous building beside the castle. It was unfortunately destroyed during air raids in 1945, but between architectural drawings, pictures, and paintings safely relocated elsewhere before the war, it has been painstakingly and precisely reconstructed to be enjoyed and marveled at once again.
We thankfully noticed we could rent audio guides which were much more informative than the panels which had English but were very short. We walked through the Palace roughly following the path a prospective guest would have taken. The building has a hallway along the outside, with sliding doors nearly everywhere leading both to inner rooms and to the surrounding courtyard. We couldn't go directly into any of the rooms, but as we walked along the corridor you could look in through the open doors and the audio guide narrated and explained things to notice.
Beginning in the Genkan, aka the entryway, we started with the simplest and plainest of the state reception rooms. However, even the plain room had large paintings along the walls and sliding doors with backgrounds of gold. The audio guide asked us to notice the ceiling, and it's simple beams and boards. If you were just barely important enough to meet with the Shogun, your meeting may have had you seated in this first room while the Shogun was sat in the second and you talked through the closed doors. However, if you were more important you would be allowed into the progressively fancier and fancier rooms. The paintings depicted rarer creatures, often animals of Chinese origin not native to Japan, and the ornamentation was more and more elaborate. The ceilings also got much fancier. From that first room with only simple straight cross braces, (although still solid pieces of wood the length of a room not at all easy to source), eventually the ceilings were lacquered, curved, painted, double layered affairs. I have included a selection of photos for you to admire.
Honmaru Palace on the left with Nagoya Castle behind it on the right
One part that stuck with me was the area for the Shogun's food. See the main kitchen was elsewhere in the grounds to keep the mess of wood fire cooking away from the Shogun, but there was a second kitchen with the fancy tatami floors (incredibly rare in a kitchen as it is a nightmare to clean) dedicated to reheating the Shogun's food before it was served. The ceiling was partially open directly above the hearth to allow smoke to escape, but the most incredulous part for me was what happened with his food after it was reheated and plated. See the Shogun's food couldn't be set on the floor, even the trays the dishes were placed on needed to be elevated, so there was a small raised second room off to the side with no windows, ornate paintings on all the walls and sliding doors. It would have been guarded, and once the food was reheated, it was set there until the time to be served.
The hearth embedded into the floor, surrounded by lacquered wood with tatami leading right up to the edge. The blue mats are to protect the tatami from visitors.
The separate room for food with some of the most ornate paintings in the entire palace, and the very important raised floor.
Electricity Museum
We just tacked this onto our day because it was close to the Palace, and we didn't have much time to explore anything else. We thought it would be a small 1-floor museum, with maybe 2 exhibits. This thing was 3 floors, with about 6 exhibits! It was huge!
The museum was actually super interesting. It talked about the different power sources that Japan has, all the ways that the electrical grid works, the discovery of electricity, environmental impacts of electricity generation and nuclear power. There were also a ton of interactive exhibits to showcase various scientific processes (like how 3-phase generators work).
It is a museum targeted at kids, so that actually meant the Japanese was simple enough for Google Translate to handle most of the time. And some displays also had English. So it was a surprisingly enjoyable time! We didn't get time to see everything, because we went there with only an hour left before it closed. If you're ever in Nagoya with kids, would definitely recommend!
Fun fact: Japan only produces about 12% of it's power from domestic sources. The rest is imported coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. This map shows where it all comes from. Apparently Canada supplies a lot of Japan's uranium and a small portion of coal.
They had a massive model demonstrating the lifecycle of electricity from Generation -> Transmission -> Use. You could point the TVs along the edge to a place in the model, and it would give you more information about what was going on there!
The model even had a train!
Interestingly, Japan's electrical grid has 2 frequencies. There are converter stations along the border so the grids can connect.
Oasis 21
Cool outdoor shopping mall that is sunken into the ground. It also extends above ground with a neat oval platform, sheltering the shopping area. It's also right by a small entertainment area, and next to a tall radio tower. Very cool to see at night, since everything gets lit up.
There was also a small concert going on nearby so we popped our heads into that. Nothing too interesting though, but a surprising amount of English!
Sunday - Port of Nagoya
The largest port in Japan. It has over a dozen different sections, each dedicated to a specific type of trade. They also have an Aquarium, Ice Breaker ship museum, and the general Port Museum. We decided to skip out on the Aquarium, but went to the other two!
The Ice Breaker museum was pretty neat. It's the Fuji Ice Breaker from Antarctic excursions between 1965 and 1983, that has been permanently docked and converted to a museum (stairways have been widened, rooms staged, and the hanger has been completely transformed into a modern information hall about the Antarctic). We saw the various rooms people slept in, the mess hall, and the captains room and more. They also had one of the helicopters on the helipad on the ship! There was also a small museum about Antarctica. Did you know that 80% of the meterorites we find on earth are in the Antarctic?
(Not our photo below, but here this is the Fuji Icebreaker-turned-museum)
After the Ice Breaker, we went to the general port museum. There we learned about the different areas of the port and it's history. It's honestly amazing how large the port area is, and the fact that most of the small islands are man-made through dredging up sand and building areas up.
Not our photo, but this is roughly what we saw out the window of the subway. You can see the ramp to load the cars, and the sea of white waiting its turn.
The frustrating thing about going to museums here is that there is so much amazing information, but so much of it is only in Japanese that we really struggle to learn new facts. I feel like I am constantly missing out on amazing things because of my lack of Japanese! Thankfully this museum had a very good series of videos with English voice-over detailing the various parts of the port though that we watched and learned a lot from.
We learned about the automation being implemented in the cranes and the vehicles that move the crates from the boats to trucks. Interestingly, the videos only really mentioned and showed trucks picking up and dropping off containers, no trains as I expected. Maybe that's more of a Canadian thing to ship stuff by train since we are so big? Also as we learned later, the Japanese trains typically run on a smaller gauge track so maybe the containers don't fit well? (Family members who know more about trains/shipping, thoughts?)
There was also some video footage of how they load the new Toyota vehicles to be shipped. There's a dedicated team of about 15 people who drive the cars onto the boats from the parking lots at the port, and secure them for transport on the high seas. When we got on the subway to go to the SCMaglev museum we actually passed a boat being loaded up! You can tell which parking lots are Toyota cars waiting for shipping since it's a sea of white.
SCMaglev Train Museum
Very cool destination that had a bunch of trains to show the evolution of trains in Japan. They also had a lot of history about the Shinkansen. There was an audio tour available, which told you about each of the ~25 train cars that they had on display. There was also a set of movies rotating through about various topics. The ones I attended were about the history of the Shinkansen (I didn't know that they have been around since the 60s!), and the evolution of the Shinkansen to push to higher speeds. Pretty incredible engineering went into making it go as fast as it does (285km/h).
There was also a section on the "next generation" trains... Maglev. Super cool trains that travel 500km/h+ through the power of Magnets.
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I learned the majority of Japanese trains have been electric for quite a long while. And it was interesting to see the style and layout change through time as things like extra doors, and lengthwise seats were added to increase the number of people who could be moved by train. Although there were lots of comfort upgrades through the years as well.
It was also interesting that Japanese trains (other than the Shinkansen) run on narrow gauge track. (For those of you who are not train nerds or did not spend an afternoon in a train museum recently, the gauge is the distance between the wheels). The Shinkansen is the exception, as a wider gauge grants more stability on turns, but the narrow system has long since been the standard for the rest of the country.
The three most influential trains.
Left is the largest steam powered train in Japan.
Middle is the 300X, a Shinkansen used to break the world train speed record.
Right is the new Maglev train with the first line still under construction.
They have a cool Shinkansen simulator as well (above)
The primary display of trains in the Museum, progressing in age from right to left. The most modern Shinkansen (700 series) is on the leftmost side.
Shinkansen seats are designed to rotate in case you are travelling in groups! Marlena tells me they have these in Canada too, but I don't believe her.
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