Thanks Mr K for putting that ear worm in my brain for half the day. 😐
We finished some work this morning and then found some free time to head for a quick shopping stop at the Higashi Chaya, Kanazawa’s oldest and most famous geisha district. Here, there are lots of heritage preserved buildings and tea houses that come alive at night; interspersed with touristy gold shops that do roaring trade during the day. We were last here in the summer of 2015 – it was 39C, humid and sticky. Today was barely 16C and raining off and on.
No, not shops that sell actual gold like the Ponte Vecchio or something, but things covered in ‘gold’… mostly craft items and beauty products either that are either guided in, or contain gold leaf. And, somewhat weirdly loads of food products with edible gold leaf on them – though it’s anybody’s guess why as gold leaf doesn’t seem to have a great deal of taste about it. **shrug**
Since we were here last there is a decidedly Chinese aesthetic creeping into a lot of the larger very gilt object d’art that we saw for sale. So more of this…
And less of the traditional Japanese lacquerware etc…
There is quite on lot of hand blown glass products with gold accents of course that seem really popular and always with the saké sets – we’ve noticed that since our last visit to Japan in 2019, there seems to be a trend towards saké jugs shaped like this one, rather than the traditional little carafes that you see used in restaurants a lot. They seem quite neat and I dare say have a much higher capacity than the small carafes, which I imagine is what is putting the restaurant industry off adopting them. 🙂 
I mostly came here to hunt for some new chopsticks. I bought four sets of lovely ebony chopsticks last time we were in Kanazawa and they are the singly most useful and used souvenir object I think I have bought back with me from any trip ever… but so far I haven’t seen any designs that took my eye for every day use at home.
The gold leaf, gold powder body products are destined to remain a mystery to me, though. I was Google Translating posters and signage like a mo-fo today, and do you think I could find anything that was able to explain ‘why’ having gold in your face creams, lotions, potions and actual face masks was supposed to be good for your skin? Nope. Not so much. The one store person I asked what the gold is good for, responded by telling me it is ‘very skin luxuriating for your complexion’. So… yeah. I guess it looks pretty and seems super fancy is the reason for it?
As for the gold leaf foods, well the fruit logs, the tea with gold leaf in, the brownies, cakes, sponges, matcha jellies all covered in gold leaf weren’t of much interest… and after the shrimp ice cream debacle, there was no way I was going to go buy a 980JPY gold leaf ice cream just to take a photo of it 😉 so here, have a picture of someone else’s that I stole off the internet somewhere.
Apparently you can’t taste anything unusual about it – and you just end up with gold leaf sticking to your lips.
While it had drizzled most of the time we were here, at one point during our short visit it started to absolutely pour down so we found ourselves taking refuge in what we thought was a cafe but turned out to be a jaffle house? Toasted sandwich restaurant? I dunno… felt like some Aussies could have been running the place – ham and cheese jaffles, egg and ham jaffles and even curry and cheese. I haven’t had a piece of white bread since maybe about February, and damn but it doesn’t taste like cake… so sweet!
I promise there were actually quite a few people wandering around here today – I just seem to have taken most of my pictures of these old buildings and winding little streets with hardly any people in them. 
After this we had to make our way to Kanazawa Station where all the city’s public transport infrastructure comes together. Like Toyama, it’s actually quite impressive how integrated the transport is here, and attached to large convenient shopping centres. We had to pop up to the Pokémon centre while we were here because, well it was there.
Pikachu in a kimono is apparently a limited edition Kanazawa Pikachu… the lady in the store went to great pains in broken English to let me know I couldn’t get this particuar stuffed Pikachu anywhere else. 
This wasn’t actually in the Pokémon store it was just a display in a regular chemist when I popped in looking for a nail file. Cute. 
Once we finished with the train stuff it was now pushing dinner time, so we went up to the restaurant level of the train station department store and found a very popular sushi restaurant called Morimori Sushi. Now Morimori had a queue that was probably about 35 people deep and we momentarily toyed with the idea of going to one of the other 20 other sushi or ramen noodle restaurants on this floor but Morimori was the only place that had anyone queuing to eat there – honestly, every other place had seats outside but no one waiting to eat at those places. So we diligently collected a number and sat down to wait…
And wait we did! It was a good 45 minutes of listening to customers being called (in Japanese!) by the time we realised just how long a wait this was going to be! And by then you’re committed right? We ended up waiting about 75 minutes to get a table!
This was definitely going to be one of those, ‘oh dear, I hope this is worth it’ things, and while I was pretty confident that I’d be happy with my wash once we managed to have some dinner, I was less confident that Mr K would find the wait worth his while given he’s not the sushi/sashimi fan in the fam. 
Speedy conveyor built sushi train:
Mr K once he realised that his beer would arrive cold and immediately! Happy face – thankfully.
The menu was quite extensive with pages and pages of offerings under each category, and our orders arrived really promptly. 
Saké and beer to start, like there was any doubt about this. I had some Tateyama Gingo saké and it was cold and delicious (it’s getting so much easier to order a drop I know I will like, the more familiar I am becoming with the local products). 
The food was delicious and imho, well worth waiting for. I had some salmon an some yellow tail sashimi, as well as some maguro tuna and some ikura ships. Everything was delicious and fresh just as you would like hope at a Japanese port town. 
Mr K catching up on some serious news.
After dinner we had to go back to the train station for a meeting with Mr Icoca. The station itself is a genuinely beautiful and modern architecturally designed piece of fabulousness… even the civic art wasn’t too hideous. 
The Motenashi Dome is an enormous glass and steel dome behind the famous Tori Gate entrance to the Kanazawa Station. It’s a HUGE undercover area – it feels a little difficult to convey the size of this space. 
The Tori Gates that welcome visitors to Kanazawa when they arrive by Shikenson, JR train, or bus. 
Hopefully we will get a bit of fine weather to see the gates in their usual timber colour rather than lit up on a rainy night. They usually look more like this:
Anyway, another long day was long. Time to call it quits for the day.
The complex is huge, we had to go up about four stories to find our cinema. Mr K is into the popcorn as per usual and we found our seats without any problem – and then the waiting. Watching the ads (all in Japanese), watching the trailers (in a mix of Japanese and English), then the cinema etiquette PSAs (all in Japanese) and then the opening credits of the film… until finally some dialogue and SCORE! It’s in English! Phew!
The movie was great fun btw – the story, the world, and the Pokemon were all very cleverly executed. I know a lot of people at home who are looking forward to seeing it and I am sure they won’t’ be disappointed.
Shopping for chopsticks and sunscreen and kites and find… sake heaven!
The variety of fish was incredible, several types of white fish, shrimps, crayfish, blowfish, shellfish and all sorts. The restaurant smelled like a seaside restaurant from the saltwater tanks and people seemed to be having a lot of fun fishing. I wanted to have some salmon and tuna though, so I didn’t have to fish for those. 🙂 
After you catch your lunch, the sushi chefs will prepare it for you and voila! Fresh to the table.
After lunch, we did a bit more shopping. Today we also went to a Kintetsu department store so I could have a bit more of a dig around the kimono and accessories department. This lovely ensemble below is JPY388,800, which is roughly AUD$4,986.00 – and I’m not so sure that includes all the accessories depicted.
The fabrics are simply gorgeous, and while most of these modern fabrics are no double machine made, I can only imagine how much time and effort went into making elaborate kimono prior to industrialization.
I adore the hair ornaments which is what I really came up here to look for – by ‘up here’ I mean the 8th floor of the department store – seems most large department stores have a traditional dress section and it will usually be located in homewares, which will be above the two levels of food hall (one of which is confectionery), followed by cosmetics and perfume, then two floors of ladieswear, one floor of menswear, one of childrenswear and then onto the homewares etc. So if you want to look for these lovely kimono and accessories, you need to keep going up.
Mr K about to chow down on his ‘Double Happiness Ramen Noodles’.
A queue that stretched for about 250m BEFORE it got to the Disney-esque rope lines that were organising visitors into an orderly squish while they waited to line up and buy tickets. Well, as much as I love the fishes (probably most of which are pilfered from the Great Barrier Reef anyway) and of course the otters, there was no way I was standing in line for several hours to enter into exhibition halls full of overexcited children and semi-distraught, but amused, parents. So we did an about-face and decided to head to an art museum instead. So many little takoyaki stalls in/around the aquarium… come see the squids and jellyfishes, don’t forget to eat some before you leave?!
Given our late start to the day, we thought we would pop in for some lunch at a cute little curry place. I love how you order a small curry and you end up with a pile of stuff to try, some of it recognisable, some of it not so much!
The Yuki Art Museum is a small gallery dedicated to the objects used in traditional Japanese tea ceremonies. The Japanese tea ceremony, or the Way of Tea, is a cultural activity that involves a ritualized ceremonial preparation of matcha, a powdered green tea. This museum house many important Japanese cultural objects, predominantly from the Edo period (approximately 1600-1870), relating to the tea ceremonies (And yes! it was much quieter and more pleasant here than at the aquarium!)
Gour used to bear hot water, late 1800s.
Water jar, Ryukyo-Suisya (Willow bridge and water wheel folding screens design) Ninsei studio, also Edo period, 17thC. 
Water kettle – Yoho (square) type, by Yojiro. Muromachi period, 16th C.
Tea bowl and dishes used in Japanese tea ceremony.
Tea bowl, mountain and river design, late Edo period, studio of Kenzan, c.1860s.
Intricately pierced lacquerware trays, late Edo period 19thC.
Tea caddies, Katatsuki (square shouldered type), Seto ware known as Shunzan-Asei, Edo period 17th C.
So much plush – must resist the urge to tidy it!
This Pokemon Centre appears to be the same as the Tokyo one, though slightly more toys and stuff crammed into slightly less space. I feel like Nintendo are really missing opportunities to properly merchandise their crap though. Most of their stuff is aimed at small kids, yet it’s overpriced and usually quite poor quality. The whole thing feels a bit weird, especially given the global popularity of Pokemon Go. Most small kids lost interest in Pokemon Go fairly quickly – you need to be mobile and have lots of time out of the house to be effective to play it… many kids relying on parents to ferry them to battles and events eventually gave up. The result of which is that the average Pokemon player seems to be in the 20s-40s and they effectively walking wallets… but come in here, and there is very limited merchandise aimed at this audience. I’m quite surprised at this oversight, as Nintendo already have the perfect model in Disney to make sure they are covering all their bases and maximising their exposure and profits. It feels like they just don’t known or care to cater to their older customers.*shrug* 
While we were at the Pokemon Centre, there was a Pokemon Trading Card game tournaments happening – there must have been 150 kids and adults all playing the trading card games. Some having a lot of fun and smiling and not taking it too seriously, and some looking very studious. Having never been to a game tournament like this, I thought it was very interesting.
I have no idea how the game is played or what’s involved, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this little kid was kicking arse! 😉 
After this stop, we did some general shopping and ended up calling it a day. Navigating Osaka in the crowds is somewhat harrowing at the best of times, navigating the trains during Golden Week is crazy – mind you, even though everywhere seems to be packed full of domestic tourists at the moment, everything feels orderly, friendly and super polite. I can’t imagine this many people being this well behaved anywhere else in the world. ‘take
Ikebukuro Main Street.
And then we found the place – basically a Disney Store but for Pokémon, and at this time of year – packed to the gills with people, lots of loud annoying music, kids running amok and more plush toys than you can poke a stick at.
Unfotunately not a lot of merchandise that was designed for adults… I was hoping to find something I could buy in bulk to take home for our local raid teams, but seriously? Golf balls, stationery or phone cases was about the extent of useful stuff that adults might like. I don’t think they are catering for their PGO market here – which from what I have seen is largely being played by 25-45 year olds. Oh well. Marketing opportunity missed there, Nintendo.
While we were there a legendary raid popped on the Pokemon Mega Centre gym, so of course we had to raid the Groudon. I managed to catch it, but Mr K had to try again on the other Pikachu gym right beside it.
Just as we were leaving, things got really out of control – a Santa Pikachu turned up with the staff and the kids went crazy! So much noise and excitement and absolutely none of it decipherable by non-Japanese speaking tourists like us.
And of course the ubiquitous vending machines full of Pokemon crap. Mostly Ditto for some reason…
For lunch, we found this restaurant which had some amazing looking okonomyaki in the display window… well, amazing for over glossy plastic representations of food, but we thought it looked like a potentially delicious cabbagey omelette spot for lunch.
However, we got inside and rapidly discovered that it was teppanyaki okonomiyaki? Cook your own damn cabbagey omelette restaurant? The Teenager looked somewhat unimpressed at having to cook his own lunch, but when in Rome, right? 
There was a pile of useful instructions, not in English of course, but it gave comfort knowing that locals don’t necessarily know how to cook their own okonomyaki either. 😉 
Our lunches arrived – raw. And looked full of possible deliciousness… so long as I didn’t fuck up the cooking bit. 😀 
Thankfully, our server was kind enough to show us how it’s done – for the first one. Preparing the plate, cooking the meat/seafood, mixing the cabbagey mixture and then forming it into a 14cm pancake. Cook covered on one side for 4 mins on a lowish temperature, then use the spatulas to flip it over and cook for another 4 mins on the other side. Handy hourglass timers were provided to make sure your okonomyaki was cooked through. 
Et voila! Tasty tasty okonomyaki lunch!
Lunch was delicious and went down lovely with a cold glass of umeshu and biru.
He was pretty excited to be there… but only pulled this face for me after I prompted him to not look so blasé. 
Now I am not an anime fan, and have no idea who all the characters are but this amusement centre/theme park was pretty full on. Rides, interactive experiences, virtual reality stuff, Segway clouds (?), a restaurant full of themed food, and of course the inevitable gift shop. I had no idea this One Piece thing was so huge… it’s about a pirate named Monkey.D Luffy on his quest to claim the treasure, the One Piece. From what I can understand it involves a lot of high drama and screaming alarmingly in Japanese at other adventuring characters. 
This of course is the token female character… Nami. And this is how she is attired while her cohorts are wearing shirts and shorts or even suits or a long pirate coat. Poor thing, can’t afford clothes. 
Kinto-un from Dragonball Z apparently.
Sake fuelled, Mr K soldiers on through his biru while we wait for some dinner. 
Ooh.. maybe there is fugu / blowfish on the menu? Do we risk it? Ah, not so much. 
Drinking on an empty stomach is never advisable but dinner was well worth waiting for… fresh sashimi – the tuna is so much better here, I swear all the tuna we have in Australia at sushi restaurants is frozen, or frozen poorly or something. In comparison, I can honestly say I have never had good tuna back home, excepting maybe Sono at Hamilton. The texture is entirely different.
Grilled chicken and pork pot stickers.
Gyoza – of course, no meal seems to be complete without some.
Some weird bean sprout omelette yumminess the name of which I can’t remember.
Sake! All the sake!
Then it was back to the trains – have I mentioned how awesome Tokyo trains are? Cheap, clean, efficient… kinda easy to navigate once you get the hang of them, super easy to navigate if you travel with your own transport industry professional! 😉 They’re great, and people are polite and mind their space, I love them – to go to Tokyo Tower.
Several stops and what seemed only a few minutes later, and up we pop in a new part of town, and the Tokyo Tower in front of us. Tokyo Tower is a communications with public observation decks in the Shiba-koen district of Minato. At 332.9 metres (1,092 ft), it is the second-tallest structure in Japan. Apparently it is inspired by the Eiffel Tower, and it is not difficult to see how. Allegedly, its distinctive orange and white colours come from a necessity to comply international air safety regulations…which then begs the question why isn’t the Eiffel Tower orange and white? Hmmm. #showerthoughts
I came here on our last trip to Tokyo and it was pretty cool to get a chance to go up the tower at night as well as having been up during the day. At the moment it is all Christmassy – lights, themed photos, projected snowflakes everywhere, and live performers on the observation deck. 
Oddly, but completely in keeping with our visit to J-World on Anime Day, we stumbled onto a One Piece 20th Anniversary exhibit and store at the Tower. There is Nami again in her signature green bikini, and loads of cool merchandise – cooler stuff than they had at the offical store in the city.
More One Piece – the little guy above with the ‘X’ on his hat is called Chopper, and he is supposed to be a reindeer that area a Hito Hito No Mi devil fruit which makes him anthropomorphic (or as the Teenager would say – makes him into a human hybrid or allows him to have human characteristics at will).
Anyway, back to the Tower… it was covered in projected snowflakes and sparkly Christmassy stuff. It was lovely. 
The views were great and my little handheld camera either totally didn’t cope or I was completely inept, because my photos from up the Tower are not great.
We stopped for a bit and had a blindingly sweet coke spider (yes, it’s freezing cold outside but there is still ice cream and frozen treats everywhere) and then after that sugar rush my photos got way better. 😉 
Thus endeth out second day in Tokyo! 🙂
Saving here for future reference, via @probzz on Twitter.