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| Tebasaki |
Last weekend I was visited by some friends from university, or rather a friend and her boyfriend, whom I had met only once and didn’t really speak to him. It was one crisp autumn morning in late November that I received a message from her asking whether we could meet up over the weekend and guide her around Nagoya and show her and her boyfriend the sights of Nagoya. A normal request you might assume, but panic began to set in, as I began to realize two things; firstly, there
are no real tourist attractions in Nagoya, secondly, the few that there are, I had never been to. Reaching into my bookshelf, I pulled out my trusty copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Japan and flipped through the book to learn about the city I’ve practically been living in for almost 4 months. There were only 8 pages in a book of about 500 that were about going to visit Japan’s fourth largest city, most of them being about which net-café to stay in or where to buy tebasaki (a type of peppery chicken wing that is almost ubiquitous in Nagoya). In other words, it was absolutely useless.
So when Saturday finally arrived, I wrapped up in my coat, scarf and jumper and headed out to Nagoya on 
the train. After eventually meeting up in the train station, we took the underground to the government district, Shiyakusho and that’s when I realised that my palms were getting moist, my forehead getting hot and my clothes were starting to stick to me. Not a tropical disease I can assure you dear reader, but something much rarer; warm weather. As a result, I arrived at Nagoya castle carrying most of my clothes under my arm in a desperate attempt to try and not boil to death (just how much snow are you getting in the U.K.?) Buying a ticket, I made sure to stop off at a traditional Japanese tea room, which sold green tea with gold leaf in it. I’m not sure what gold leaf adds to the flavour or how Zen the experience of drinking something so opulent is. My friends and I took a short detour through the woods, passing by a depiction of Nagoya castle as a piece of tofu with flowers in its hair on the way. After the hippie’s wet dream we went to see a bunch of actors dressed up as soldiers, accompanied by a cutesy representation of Ieyasu Tokugawa. I’m still waiting for Hampton Court to feature a cutesy Henry VIII wandering from room to room killing his cutesy wives or a doe-eyed Winston Churchill chasing an adorable Hitler around the war rooms. Eventually we made our way to the inner walls of the castle compound, only to realise when we got there it was still largely a building site. Apparently, the castle was completely burnt to the ground during World War 2; half of it was rebuilt in 1959, but didn’t start re-building the other half until 2009.
the train. After eventually meeting up in the train station, we took the underground to the government district, Shiyakusho and that’s when I realised that my palms were getting moist, my forehead getting hot and my clothes were starting to stick to me. Not a tropical disease I can assure you dear reader, but something much rarer; warm weather. As a result, I arrived at Nagoya castle carrying most of my clothes under my arm in a desperate attempt to try and not boil to death (just how much snow are you getting in the U.K.?) Buying a ticket, I made sure to stop off at a traditional Japanese tea room, which sold green tea with gold leaf in it. I’m not sure what gold leaf adds to the flavour or how Zen the experience of drinking something so opulent is. My friends and I took a short detour through the woods, passing by a depiction of Nagoya castle as a piece of tofu with flowers in its hair on the way. After the hippie’s wet dream we went to see a bunch of actors dressed up as soldiers, accompanied by a cutesy representation of Ieyasu Tokugawa. I’m still waiting for Hampton Court to feature a cutesy Henry VIII wandering from room to room killing his cutesy wives or a doe-eyed Winston Churchill chasing an adorable Hitler around the war rooms. Eventually we made our way to the inner walls of the castle compound, only to realise when we got there it was still largely a building site. Apparently, the castle was completely burnt to the ground during World War 2; half of it was rebuilt in 1959, but didn’t start re-building the other half until 2009. |
| Miso Katsu |
Standing in the open courtyard, being slowly roasted by my over enthusiasm for cold weather, we made our way to the donjon - twin keeps connected by a raised walkway, and looked at the exhibitions inside. One of the key features of the castle is that it has two tiger-headed dolphins on the top posed in such a way as they look like deep-fried prawns (another Nagoya speciality) from far away. After visiting the various exhibitions and sitting on various displays of traditional Aichi culture, we went to the next best place; the wretched hive of saturated fats and heart attacks known locally as Yabaton. Yabaton, for those that aren’t aware, is a local restaurant chain that serves deep-fried pork in a miso sauce. The taste can a little overpowering for a newcomer, but my friend’s boyfriend seemed to enjoy himself immensely. In fact he was so pleased by the meal that he bought a T-shirt from the restaurant, which I suppose is right up there, in terms of fashion statements, with buying a T-shirt with a haggis on it from Scotland, or a Cheesesteak on it from Philadelphia or a kangaroo on it from Australia.
Afterwards we headed to the Osu district of Nagoya, one of the few places I had been before, sometimes called the Akihabara of Nagoya (minus the maid cafes, the porn, the wall-to-wall electronics or anything that really makes Akihabara what it is). Osu itself largely consists of a large covered street with innumerable clothes shops, shoe shops, South American restaurants and trendy cafes. In short it’s more like Paris than Akihabara, well it would be if central Paris didn’t have any white people. We visited the giant Shinto temple there called Osu Kannon, got our fortunes, rang the big bell and quickly moved on. Travelling to Sakae, the city’s entertainment district and home to the so-called Sakae girls (girls who dress in short skirts and wear their in dyed ringlets that flock to the innumerable nightclubs here), I felt obliged to introduce my charges to yet another Nagoya speciality and something I’d never had before – Hitsumabushi. Hitsumabushi is charcoal-grilled eel served with rice, stock, wasabi and other accompaniments. The idea is that you divide the eel into quarters, the first quarter you eat unadulterated, the second you eat with wasabi and seaweed, the third you eat with stock and the last you have as you like it. I ruined my last quarter by putting too much stock in my bowl, turning my delicately balanced and harmonious meal into a rice gruel with bits of eel floating in it. Unfortunately my friend’s boyfriend didn’t like eel, so he had the thing on the menu with the least eel in it – dried eel spines. It was like watching Monty Python’s spam sketch. So while he sat there eating his bones, my friend and I quickly finished up so we could go to another restaurant so he could get his fill of another Nagoya speciality – Oyako-don, a name that means parent and child rice bowl. In case you haven’t figured it out, this relates to the fact that the dish consists of chicken and egg. Wikipedia calls this turn of phrase poetic; to me it’s more of a brutal reminder of harsh reality. Having torn apart a family by shovelling it into our gaping maws we said goodbye and I went back to resolutely under-exposing myself to the culture of my new home.
Apologies for the lateness of this update; you'll get two this week to make up for it
