Bear Soup After 10 years, I've finally been back to Japan for a visit. We just got back to Hong Kong after spending a week in Gunma and Tokyo. The main purpose of our visit was to spend some time at a hot-springs resort in the country and a couple of days checking out Tokyo and catching up with a friend who is still living in Japan.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much Japanese I was able to use - in fact I think I did better than when I was living there, although that's not too surprising since I studied Japanese for another 18 months after I returned to Australia. But it was nice to be able to follow the TV shows a lot more - and I don't mean just the crazy ones.

As always some things never change in Japan - the trains are good and run on time, odd snacks abound, and all the TV stars are almost exactly the same ones that were on TV ten years ago, doing bascially the same shows. But I found I have a new appreciation for some things. I had always felt that Tokyo was noisy and polluted - but since living in Hong Kong I thought this time around that Tokyo was actually pretty quiet (in terms of traffic and construction noise) and certainly the skies over Tokyo are way less murky than Hong Kong.



Gunma was quite beautiful and as long as you don't mind inappropriate lumps of concrete or power lines spoiling your view, you could almost imagine that you were in a pristine setting. The hot-springs resort is on the bank of the Takaragawa river - there are four rotenburo (outdoor hot-springs) along the riverbank, so while we sat in the gentle hot water just 50cm away a freezing cold river raced along, carrying the last of the winter snow down to the sea.



It was my first time in a rotenburo as well (I think). And I was a bit alarmed at first - for the life of me I couldn't work out where we were supposed to clean up before we entered the hot-spring. After a while I noticed though that no-one was having a bath before getting in the hot-spring. So that was ok.

And the food was great. Here are some highlights - gamonabe (duck stew), the meals we ate at the resort, yakiniku with Phil (Japanese beef just melts in your mouth), a sushi-train, the various snacks we ate at an izakaya, and of course a good yakitori session. Phil took us to a restaurant called Gompachi, which was apparently the place that inspired the setting for the big fight scene in Kill Bill 1. Very much a tourist kind of place, but the food was good and actually it looks quite cool.



The lowlight of the trip though was bear soup. It actually tastes ok - quite gamey, and the soup base is very good. But to be honest I felt a bit sad about eating it - there are some bears in cages at the hot-springs resort, and they don't look like they're having a very good time, and if they're ending up in soup I can understand why.

So that's it then - Japan is still good, Tokyo is still big and bright, Japanese food is still very very good, and hot-springs are still extremely relaxing. Just stay away from the bear soup.



tags: japan | tokyo | gunma  ¶ 3:54 PM