I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and a duffel:
This trip was split into three parts: time with my immediate family, going to a conference, and then time with my partner. They were all great and also I am glad to be home.
I’ll post my abbreviated travel notes here, including activity and food recommendations.
We started in Tokyo but we were only there for about 40 hours. We focused our time mostly on arts and crafts: we did a kintsugi workshop, spent time at an artists cooperative, and then did a lot of walking around. This was a good intro to the trip, because everyone kept waking up at 4am and crashing at 7pm due to the jet lag. 4am wakeup makes for nice morning walks to 7-Eleven.
I brought my family to T’s Tantan in Tokyo Station because I’m vegetarian and it’s otherwise hard to find ramen that approaches kosher in Japan. It continues to be great and I really appreciate having a steady vegetarian option available. Many years ago when I visited Tokyo there was a place that served a delicious tomato-based vegetarian ramen, but I hear it has since permanently closed. Bummer.
We took the shinkansen to Kanazawa. I love the train. It’s fast. It’s quiet. You can eat your snacks on board and gaze out the window as the world whizzes by. It’s nice.
We toured a soy sauce factory (meh; they don’t let you in the room where the magic happens) and the old town (pretty!) before finally eventually ending up at our small hotel in Toyama: Satoyama Auberge Maki No Oto. I highly recommend this hotel. It is beautiful, the staff is lovely, the food was excellent, and they were very accomodating of me being vegetarian.
We continued on to Toyama, which is a port town. We got to talking with an older local guy who told us all about his favorite local spots. We learned after leaving that this guy has extraordinarily fancy taste and they were all either Michelin starred or at least Michelin rated and with a lead time of months. We opted to instead go to a local brewery, which had a ghost pepper beer (!) and pizza.
We then moved on via train to Osaka, where we transferred to a car to head (eventually) to our hotel in the hills near Nara. We toured the Daimon sake brewery. They explained every little thing about the process, which was especially interesting to me, as I’ve done some small amount of homebrewing and I bake. They sounded similar. We had a tasting and even got to talk to Daimon-san. I recommend going.
I also recommend the Akame 48 waterfalls walk/hike, which has some exquisite falls, and Murou Art Forest. They had some really wonderful installations.
My brother and I parted ways from the rest of my family in Osaka: they headed further west and we headed north to Itō on the Izu peninsula. We got a surprise perfectly clear view of Fuji along the way.
It’s beautiful there. They don’t seem to welcome foreigners in a lot of their restaurants (we were turned away several times) but one place had a guy who enthusiastically welcomed us in. We ended that evening enjoying a some food and a beer while also being stared at by a 300lb completely tattooed guy. It was a little unsettling but we left without incident.
My brother and I made our way to Tokyo for the day before his flight and before my train north to Hakodate for RubyKaigi. I once again did that thing where I walked around in humid 80F heat with a large backpack and pants and was extraordinarily warm toward the end of the day. After about a liter of Aquarius on the train north I felt better.
I stayed at Yunokawa Prince Hotel Nagisatei which I would like to especially call out for having an enormous, diverse, and very vegetarian friendly breakfast. Every morning I got to try new and tasty things and even feel full after. It was great.
Hakodate is beautiful in the spring. I arrived at peak cherry blossom season and Goryokaku, their star shaped fort, is absolutely decked out in cherry blossoms. It is also moderately swarmed by tourists (in this case, three cruise ships). It didn’t feel over-crowded though. I enjoyed eating at The Bear King which had a vegetarian friendly option.
The next day was the committer meeting. I don’t remember a ton from it other than people talking at length about the semantics of deep freezing an object (do you freeze its class? its class’s superclass? …?). I picked up my badge and also got to check out my colleague Chris Salzberg’s bar SOLENOID! It’s a neat spot. I headed out to go find some dinner.
This is about when I got a message on my phone that there was going to be an earthquake, so I walked back into the bar and said “hey, did you get this?” just before everything started shaking. It was the biggest earthquake I’ve experienced, but I was metaphorically not too shaken up. Then we got the tsunami warning.
Chris’s bar is already something like 8 meters above sea level and at the foot of Mt Hakodate. With the city sirens going off and the police directing traffic with batons, though, I decided my best bet was just to march directly up the mountain to get more elevation. Since the tsunami wasn’t scheduled to arrive for about 20 or 30 minutes and my hotel was across the sea-level part of town, I parked myself on a little concrete post. Chris found me eventually. Someone told us that there was a middle school offering refuge, so we went and hung out on the side of the gymnasium. They were really nice about it.
On Wednesday, the conference started. It was really well signed and organized. My usual complaint with conferences is that there’s nothing to eat for vegetarians (or that we get mashed with the gluten-free people and each group only gets a salad and bad bread) but that did not happen! They had really stellar vegetarian bento. They had a lot of leftovers toward the end of lunch so I even went and got a second. This was about when I started freaking out because my speaking slot was approaching and I wasn’t yet feeling my talk.
Normally when I give a talk, I get up in front of people and I pace and gesticulate and productively complain and throw in some fun anecdotes and the audience, one way or another, ends up learning about JITs at scale, or Scheme semantics, or something. It’s what I’d done for my little lunch talk at Brown two weeks prior. I even titled that talk One must imagine compiler engineers happy so there was plenty of room for educational complaining. But this RubyKaigi talk was in front of an enormous crowd and toward a more general audience than I was used to addressing. The slides did not feel like they were flowing until about twenty minutes before my talk.
In the end it went alright. I realized about 40 seconds in that I had way too much content so I ended up speaking rapidly for 30 minutes straight, completely unaware of the audience (which you can’t see anyway because of the lights). I only really noticed people when I made a dumb six-seven joke and Aaron laughed.
The rest of the conference I was able to relax and enjoy other people’s talks. I got some good hallway track in, too. I think there’s a good group of people who are interested in Ruby tracing (for example, Perfetto in ZJIT) so maybe we will make something happen.
We had a nice small dinner at Yasai Bar Miruya, which was vegan (!) and had some nice sake. The host was very friendly, too.
I nerd-sniped John and J into implementing a VM for the Universal Machine. This was a daunting homework assignment back in undergrad but it was a fun project later in life.
S joined toward the end of the conference. She’s also vegetarian so we got some really excellent vegetarian ramen at MAIDO Ramen.
Finally, S and I headed south on the shinkansen for Nikko.
Nikko is small, beautiful, and a tourist day-trip town. Dinner closes early. Shops close earlier. Since we were staying there we had to make sure to track down and visit the one or two vegetarian places before they shuttered.
S and I, along with J and J, took the bus up from Nikko, up the windiest switchbacks, to the Kegon Falls. We were going to take a boat across the lake, but the water level was too low for the dock on the other side, so we ended up half hiking and half taking a bus. Then we continued our hike through the Senjōgahara Marshland (beautiful), to the Yudaki Cascades (lovely), which also had a surprise restaurant and ice cream shop at the base! It’s called Yutaki Rest House. After some great (vegetarian friendly!! wow!!) udon, we marched up the waterfall and around Yuno Lake at the top to Yumoto Onsen. In order to make the last reasonable bus back to town, we just enjoyed putting our feet in the foot bath.
One day was rainy. In the evening, J and I thought it would be fun to continue our Universal Machine implementations. As Norman Ramsey would say, “my implementation is 90 lines long and runs sandmark in under six seconds.”
We also enjoyed doing a tour of the shrines right above Nikko. The shrines are resplendent against the backdrop of forest.
Pro bus tip: you can either pay by IC card or credit card. No need to grab a ticket if you do that.
S and I shipped our bags (thanks, Yamato) before continuing on to the small town of Moka, the staging area for our big pottery festival day. Unfortunately, there was no good way to get there: there was no reasonable series of trains and no taxi would take us. Ultimately we ended up taking the train to Utsonomiya and catching the long local bus to Moka. About twenty minutes into this ride, in the middle of nowhere, bus nearly empty, the bus driver pulled over and ran over to us looking kind of panicked. He asked where we were going and was visibly relieved when we said Moka. I suppose we are not the usual riders. Very nice of him.
Upon arrival, S introduced me to CoCo ICHIBANYA, which is also super vegetarian friendly. I loved it. We ate really well before walking to our tiny hotel.
We did not really know what to expect from the Mashiko pottery festival. The internet said it would be crowded and to arrive early, so we got up at 6:30am for estimated 7am departure on the tiny train from Moka to Mashiko. On most trains you can pay with an IC card but we were out in the sticks so we asked the only other guy on the platform how to pay for the train. He said he had no idea and that this was his first time here. When the train showed up completely packed to the gills and we had to (politely) push onto it, we started to realize that this was The Event and it was going to be mayhem.
Also, fun fact: the way the Moka train payment works is that you grab a little ticket from the train, and, upon arrival, wait in line to present your ticket to two very overwhelmed looking people at a table, who charge you, and you pay in cash.
Onto Mashiko: the festival was packed. There’s pottery everywhere the eye can see. There are tents and there are full buildings. It varies in quality and artistry from fine to jaw-droppingly spectacular. You could completely stock your kitchen from this fair alone and it would even be cost-effective. The main bummer for us is that we had to get pottery safely back home. We limited ourselves to a reasonable assortment but we really wanted to buy a beautiful painted 20 inch plate with a bird on a branch.
After a ton of walking around, we took another long long bus back to Utsonomiya and continued onto Karuizawa. We didn’t know what to expect from Karuizawa but, having been, I could probably concisely describe it as “Aspen for people from Tokyo”. It was… fine. We loved our hotel, Tsuruya Ryokan. The manager was very excited when we borrowed a Studio Ghibli DVD from their collection.
We continued on to Tokyo, our final stop. We our usual tour of stationery stores and bakeries—the bread was something to write home about (har har). We enjoyed a (vegetarian!! friendly!!) kaiseki meal at Hyoki Shabu-shabu Ginza before enjoying some live music at Rocky Top.
We also recommend Jikasei MENSHO for vegetarian ramen.
Bakery checklist:
We had an uneventful and reasonably easy trip home. Whew. Long post for a long trip. See you next year in Miyazaki!