Five Cities In Three Countries Over 16 Days, Part 4: Sapporo And Back To Tokyo, Japan
We had been in Tokyo and Hakodate for the previous few days so now it was time to board the train again, bound for Sapporo.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Although we were well-rested, after eating some bizarre Lucky Pierrot snacks we still managed to nod off on the train, something I am completely unable to do in a bed for some reason. It was another four-hour journey that had us in Sapporo a bit after 7:00pm and it sounds like a cool place to spend the coming days:
Sapporo is a city in Japan. It is the largest city north of Tokyo and the largest city in Hokkaido, the northernmost main island off the country. It ranks as the fifth most populous city in Japan. It is the capital city of Hokkaido Prefecture and Ishikari Sub-prefecture. Sapporo lies in the southwest of Hokkaido, within the alluvial fan of the Toyohira River, which is a tributary stream of the Ishikari. It is considered the cultural, economic, and political center of Hokkaido.
As with most of Hokkaido, the Sapporo area was settled by the indigenous Ainu people, beginning over 15,000 years ago. Starting in the late 19th century, Sapporo saw increasing settlement by Yamato migrants.
Sapporo is ranked first in the attractiveness ranking of cities in Japan. The annual Sapporo Snow Festival draws more than 2 million tourists.
Although there was snow on the ground we had missed the snow festival, but that didn’t matter, because we had more pressing matters to take care of after checking in to our hotel — Dinner. Around 9% of the Singaporean population is of Indian descent so eating lamb there is reasonably common, but years ago when I was teaching adult Japanese students they often mentioned that they had never tried it, mainly due to the fact that they hated the smell. That wouldn’t be the case in Sapporo though, because it is a local specialty, particularly what is referred to as a “Genghis Khan” or lamb barbecue. In typical fashion, Anna wanted to try the best and found Jingisukan Shepherd’s Shop Itadakimasu and when we arrived a bit before 8:30 there was a long queue waiting to get in. In what would somehow become a consistent trend for us in Sapporo, there was some kind of twist of fate when 20 minutes later, despite the fact that there were people waiting behind us, a staff member came out, checked how many of us would be dining, and then put a sign directly behind Anna and myself stating that that was where the queue ends, they won’t be serving any more people, and turned the rest away. I guess we got there just in time.
After half an hour of waiting in the cold we were inside a room that obviously smelled strongly of lamb so we took off our jackets and pulled up a seat in front of a little dome-shaped grill. Bean sprouts and onions were spread around the base and a big block of fat cut straight from a piece of meat was placed on top to slowly grease our barbecue. We were able to keep choosing different cuts to cook for ourselves over the duration of our time inside and by the time we were done there was a thick layer of grease covering each of our dipping sauce dishes, but it was definitely a good choice for our first meal in town.
Once done we did the usual and found a bar to kick back in for a couple of hours while the Sapporo baseball team’s match was being broadcast to the patrons’ delight, passing a giant, luminous Nikka Whiskey sign along the way, something that we would use as a landmark over the coming days. Because some bars still allow smoking in Japan, by the time we returned to our hotel we smelled like a combination of lamb fat and cigarettes, but our first day in town was a good indicator of what was to come:
Thursday, March 28, 2024
If we thought the lamb was good the previous night, it was going to pale in comparison to everything else we would eat here, however, there was still the issue of some internal conflict in my digestive system now five days after we had returned from Laos and it didn’t seem to be easing up anytime soon.
Anyway, today would be spent exploring the city and doing a ton of shopping, but there were two things that needed to be taken care of first; there was a Lawson near our hotel, actually they were everywhere, having counted eight on the walk to dinner the previous night, so I grabbed my usual egg salad sandwich, but Anna was focussed on other things. As I mentioned in my previous post, Hokkaido is renowned for it’s dairy products so after a coffee to start the day, she was also interested in ice cream, under normal circumstance an odd brunch choice, but not so much for us here in Sapporo. Naturally she found the perfect place for it, Yukijirushi Parlor Honten, right near our hotel and although the website shows small little dishes of ice cream, that certainly isn’t what you receive. When we arrived there were ice cream cakes and enormous sundaes in the window, but we thought they were just for display. We had thought wrongly. A table of three girls behind us had ordered a sundae and it was like a colossal martini glass with an arrangement of ice cream, fresh and canned fruit, and whipped cream and we had no idea how these girls were going to finish it. luckily ours, although still quite large, seemed manageable, especially because I don’t really have a sweet tooth, but that’s one of the great things about the ice cream here, it’s kind of salty. Anna did the bulk of the heavy lifting so we managed to finish the sundae, as somehow the girls behind us did too:
Seriously, this is by some means considered a reasonable amount of ice cream:
We spent the next hour or so walking around, doing a bit of shopping, but the ice cream was just a snack and now it was time for lunch. Anna had done a bit of research while we were still back in Singapore almost two weeks prior and discovered that there is a ramen alley in Sapporo, just an alleyway entirely of ramen stores. Yes, we’d had ramen in Tokyo and loved it, but what she had stumbled upon was, in keeping with the dairy theme a particular store in the alley, Sapporo Ramen Haruka, that specialised in cheese ramen and as soon as I heard about it I was sold. In fact, despite being a store where you’re probably not going to spend more than about S$10.00 (US$7.50) for a bowl of noodles, it’s rating on TripAdvisor makes it the #2 restaurant in the city!
It was almost 2:00pm when we arrived at the ramen alley so we figured we would’ve beaten the lunch crowd and wouldn’t have to wait too long, but we were dead wrong. We joined the line as a giant crow circled overhead and landed on a ledge directly above Anna, completely freaking her out. We weren’t leaving with out having lunch there so we’d have to grin and bear it as a couple of people would exit the restaurant every 10 minutes or so, allowing the next one or two people in. We just stood around laughing at the signs for terrible-looking hostess clubs including one where a woman had what looked like a monobrow, weird stickers on the walls of other ramen joints, and me periodically having to go to the bathroom down the alley to alleviate my stomach issues. Despite how much we were eating, I doubt I’d be gaining much weight in Japan.
Eventually it happened again; just like the night before a staff member came out and put a sign behind us, officially signalling that we’d be the last ones served for lunch that day, that’s twice we had cut it a little too close to eat what we had been anticipating, but after almost an hour of waiting in line we were seated inside a small izakaya with the walls covered in heavy metal posters and album covers and we were ready to order. Obviously I was getting the Miso Cheese Ramen, described as (using Google Translate):
A new sensation! Our popular menu blends multiple cheeses including Hokkaido cheese and retains the light taste of miso.
Sounds perfect. Anna ordered a different one and we split 50/50 and it was even better than expected, plus the sole cook was nice enough to snap a photo for us after I got talking to him about music. I’m usually skeptical about reviews on TripAdvisor, because there are some very petty people on there, but when there are only four one-star reviews out of 440, it’s definitely going to be good and I’m beginning to believe Americans might be right about one thing; you can put cheese on anything and it instantly becomes better (provided it’s actual cheese)!
Waiting around and then finally eating:
I mentioned how the place had heavy metal posters on the wall and that there were only four one-star reviews. To be fair, one of the negative reviewers liked the food, but I think she might have confused a Motörhead flag near the entrance with Nazi paraphernalia:
We were full once more so it was time to get shopping again for a few hours and although it didn’t seem as cold most of the time as some of the photos make it out to be, it was freezing when the wind blew up, that just went right through our clothes.
Our time in Hokkaido was almost entirely going to be about eating so obviously Anna already had dinner sorted for us only four hours after finishing lunch, but luckily it wasn’t going to be anything huge, rather a small plate set menu restaurant booked for 7:30pm, plus I had been emptying out regularly so fitting more in wasn’t going to be a problem. We continued shopping, mostly down a long arcade that covered several blocks that was full of vintage clothing shops among others, finding incredible bargains across the city, particularly for me in music stores, and before long it was time to get to Hanakoji Sawada. The restaurant was on the third floor of a building with plenty of other bars and restaurants in it so as we were entering Anna pointed to a sign with several bars listed on it and said, “There’s one you might like to try later”. “Ha ha”, I replied, thinking that she was mocking me and telling me to go to a place called ‘Pooh Bar’ due to the frequency at which I had been going to the bathroom, however, I didn’t notice the name of the place above it, ‘Abel’, my surname. Oops.
We entered the restaurant and pulled up our seat at the counter of the open kitchen and were advised that although we could take photos of our food, we couldn’t take any of the kitchen or staff without their consent. After the first couple of courses were brought out, a woman who Anna said was almost certainly from Singapore sat next to me and each dish she was served she hilariously felt the need to close her eyes and waft up the aroma, followed by taking a small bite, looking up, and rolling the morsel around on her tongue like she was some kind of food critic, despite the fact that she had clearly just come from work so obviously I had to subtly mock her. We finished up and don’t get me wrong, the food there was great, but a little underwhelming for a Michelin Star restaurant.
Dinner was done so we walked back down the road, laughing at the signs for all of the host and hostess bars and found ourselves at a cocktail bar that also seemed to be a casino with an employee running a poker table in the corner. It had cheap free-flow beer and cocktails for the whole night so we settled in for drinks and a few games of Jenga.
Some of the arcade, some dishes from dinner, me impersonating the hosts, and the view of out landmark from the bar:
Friday, March 29, 2024
We decided to start the day out differently, except for a brief stop in Lawson, by walking the opposite direction and going to Daimaru. For my Melbourne friends, yes, it is a shopping mall and department store, but no, despite being the same franchise it’s nothing like that one.
Anna loves baumkuchen, the German cakes, but must’ve been in her own little world once again when I pointed out a sign that said there was a baumkuchen expo on. While walking around in the food area for a bit I suddenly heard a shriek, “Oh my God, there’s a baumkuchen expo on!”. Yup, I’m aware of that, I believe I told you earlier. She stocked up, buying a variety of the cakes for herself as well as her friends and family, but something else caught her eye; the LeTao stall would be selling a limited quantity of another cake that Anna loves at 3:00pm, these particular ones filled with mascarpone custard and Hokkaido cream, and when she saw that sign I think I may have even witnessed a small tear of joy run down her cheek. It was still only 2:00pm, we were in the food court, and we hadn’t had okonomyaki thus far so I managed to convince her to have a bite to eat before she lined up and when she did join the queue I had a look around other parts of the mall, including finding yet another incredible secondhand music stall. Suddenly I received a text with an image using Google Translate that said the cakes were sold out so when I went back to find Anna she was standing there with a smug look on her face. In what seemed to be becoming more than just a coincidence, the line was stopped immediately behind her and Anna had managed to buy the last two cakes, they had all sold out in seven minutes. We walked back to our hotel to dump off the bags of baumkuchen and eat the cream cakes and although I said earlier that I don’t really have a sweet tooth, these cakes were unbelievably good!
Maybe it’s just me, but when I hear Sapporo I think of the beer so the plan for the rest of the afternoon was to go to the Sapporo Beer Museum. That official link is only available in Japanese, but the museum’s Wikipedia page tells us this:
The Sapporo Beer Museum is a museum located in the Sapporo Garden Park in Higashi-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaidō, Japan. Registered as one of the Hokkaidō Heritage sites in 2004, the museum is the only beer museum in Japan. The red-brick building was erected originally as a factory of the Sapporo Sugar Company in 1890, and later opened as a museum in July 1987. The building also houses the Sapporo Beer Garden in the south wing.
We entered the building and first ordered some beers each. Tours of breweries usually drag on and are quite boring so we decided just to explore the three floors at our own pace and that was certainly the best option, because besides some cool old posters there wasn’t much interesting to be seen. That is except for the buttered scallop and soy sauce flavoured Pringles we found in the gift shop, we would definitely be picking some of those up.
Eating in Daimaru and strolling through the beer museum:
We were meeting up with some of Anna’s old fellows and collaborators that night, the museum closes quite early and it wasn’t warm enough to be sitting in the beer garden so we decided to have a look at a nearby mall and it soon occurred to us that this wasn’t a particularly interesting part of the city. After roaming around through three floors of camping equipment, children’s toys, and restaurants serving unfeasibly large hamburgers we stopped off at a store to stock up on some amazing-looking dried seafood, as well a deliciously salty soft-serve cone before we started to move on back in the general direction of where we’d be meeting them, close to the Nikka sign again.
The first two people we met up with were a really cool couple, Young and his wife, also named Anna. Young’s the only ophthalmologist in a remote Japanese town and Anna used to be a dentist for some psychopathic reason and when we met them they took us to an almost private restaurant for possibly the greatest sushi and sashimi I’ve ever had in my life with the chef giving an insane level of attention to small visual details courtesy of his absurdly sharp knives. One thing you notice almost immediately is how good actual wasabi is, because most of the time what passes for “wasabi” in most of the world is just horseradish dyed green and I’m not a fan of horseradish. Proper wasabi on the other hand is really good and doesn’t overpower the flavour of what you’re eating, as opposed to using what is essentially hot English mustard. I did, however, make a near-fatal error of biting into and swallowing the internal genitalia of what I was later told was a cooked anglerfish, causing boiling hot fish semen to scorch me all the way down inside to my sternum to everyone else’s amusement. The only way to soothe that burn would be to drink a ton of beer so we took the couple back to the bar/casino from the previous night where another of Anna’s fellows, Kengo, met us, mocking the host bar posters again along the way, for some more free-flow, as well as an impromptu cocktail pouring competition and a conversation about why the hosts in the posters always have one hand up, usually obstructing part of their face. Is it to create an air of mystery? Who knows.
More of Friday’s food and friends, I can’t recall all of the sushi dishes, but the one that burnt me is the bulbous thing in the bowl of rice:
Saturday, March 30, 2024
The final day of this crazy trip was upon us and it would begin with us taking a very short flight back to Tokyo, as opposed to the eight-hour train ride and finally my stomach was almost back to normal, perhaps the result of the stabilising properties of ingesting boiling fish jizz. Anna’s mum and some of her childhood friends were staying at the apartment to celebrate them all turning 70 this year so we would be spending that night at a hotel in Kabukichō:
Kabukichō is an entertainment district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Kabukichō is the location of many host and hostess clubs, love hotels, shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, and is often called the “Sleepless Town”. Shinjuku Golden Gai, famous for its plethora of small bars, is part of Kabukichō.
That ticks a lot of boxes, but the main reason we chose it was because our hotel would be right near Shinjuku Station and we’d need to catch a 90-minute train to a different airport at 6:30am the following morning so the first item on the list was to go through the painful process of booking train tickets in an overcrowded station in the early afternoon on a Saturday. Once that was sorted we checked into our hotel just behind Godzilla Road, with a giant bonsai in the lobby and Godzilla’s head perched on the building itself, overlooking the district.
We had a look around the area and checked out some shops for a few hours, but we couldn’t really buy much now that our suitcases were full of cakes and seafood, plus the crowds were only getting larger. Instead we found a bar on Godzilla Road that had a deal on oysters, one of the condiments for them being “ethnic sauce”, so we had a plate of those washed down with a few beers until it was time to walk to the the station through pro-Palestine protests, find my mother-in-law and her friends, and rescue them by acting as a mobile landmark as I led them to dinner through the hoards of people.
Saturdays in this part of town are epic!:
Dinner finished early and Anna’s mum and her friends wanted to get back to the apartment and although we had to get up at 5:30am the next morning, our last night in Japan was in party central on a Saturday night. We went back to the same bar where we had had the oysters earlier, because it was in a great spot right near our hotel, but then Anna remembered — We were just around the corner from the Crawdaddy Club. This has to be one of my favourite bars in the world, I stumbled upon it when I first visited Tokyo in 2012, a rock joint belonging to two guys who, unbeknownst to them, looked identical to a Japanese incarnation of Vince and Howard from The Mighty Boosh. It wasn’t open when we were last in Tokyo due to it being Golden Week, but I wasn’t missing it this time around. We arrived, pulled up a seat, and while listening to some great music I showed Anna a photo from that first time we were here, then we looked at the manager, back at the photo, then at the manager again, and we realised he was wearing the exact same shirt that he had been wearing that night 12 years prior, albeit a bit faded now. I felt the need to point it out to him and although he found the photo hilarious, he discreetly changed shirts a little later.
Even though we had to leave early we spent the rest of the night just chatting to the staff, as well as some random American tourist that was sitting next to me, closing out a great final night in Japan:
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Somehow we did it, we managed to get up on time, check out of the hotel, walk to the train station, and find our platform early. They aren’t kidding when they call Kabukichō the “Sleepless Town”, because the action was still going when we walked through with our suitcases at 6:00am (below), people still out, some just sitting in groups having beers, others perhaps just looking for a ride home.
Once on the train we couldn’t fall asleep, because we had to stop our suitcases rolling away, but an hour and a half later we were at the airport and were back in Singapore by 6:00pm, enough time for Anna to have a decent nap before work the following day after an epic two weeks.
Our time in India for a conference, Laos to do volunteer work, and then finally Japan for a holiday was an epic trip, but it’s got nothing on the next one coming up. All I know is we’re definitely going to take more advantage of the apartment in Nakameguro, why didn’t we do this earlier?
6:00am on a Sunday morning in Kabukichō
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