Day 20 in Japan - Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes.

Today marks the start of Obon, and is a semi-holiday for the Japanese. Semi-holiday means that I still have to go to school, but virtually no one else did. It was totally empty except for about 4 people, and all but one of them had left by lunchtime. So the entire afternoon was just Kyoto-sensei (vice-principal, the guy who is my boss) and I looking at each other across the classroom. I would have tried to make an early escape, except that at lunchtime he told me that my finishing time today was 3 pm, so I had to sit and watch the clock until then. I escaped for a little while to work on ye olde English wall for a little while, but after a while the pull of the air-conditioned staffroom overcame the weird empty feeling, so I headed back. I am pretty sure that Kyoto-sensei was just waiting for 3 pm to roll by so he could stop supervising me as well, because he was packed and ready to go by the time I was walking out the door. Was my first early mark in Japan, and it did feel really nice to be free and riding my bikie down the hill with my hair blowing in the wind at 3 pm on a Friday afternoon (until I realised how poor the brakes on my bike have gotten, but that’s a story for another time).

Obon is a festival where the spirits of your ancestors are supposed to come and visit, and so people spend time with their families in their homes, and the often clean up and tidy the graves of their ancestors. For some reason, as today was both Friday the 13^th and the start of Obon, I thought it might be appropriate, to visit a graveyard on my way home, so I took a longcut and went to a small graveyard. There was a family starting to tend to a grave there, and everything was pretty neat and tidy. They started out by poring water into bamboo tubes in the ground, and then onto little stone pillars. I have no idea what that was for, but I wanted to write it down so I could remember to find out later. There was a lot of broken pottery and tiles and things in a corner, which I gather are the remains of various offerings to the spirits. It’s interesting to have a waste disposal problem in a cemetery. The graveyard is also on a small hill, so I got a bit of a view out over Okubo.

As it was a Friday night, and Sam and I were footloose and fancy free, we hopped a train to the “big city” (note: Akashi city is not really a big city – population of 300,000 makes it about the same size as Wollongong) to make our fortunes and cut some rugs. We ended up wandering in a department store because it started raining a little, and found some awesome stationary and a great music store . Sam headed off to the toilet at one point and I ended up waiting for ages for him to come back. When he finally resurfaced, he said he’d been a little scared to leave the stall, because the guy in the next cubicle was having a full service – brushing his teeth, gargling, and doing all of his daily bathroom activities. In the middle of the equivalent of a Grace Bros.

Eventually, we found our way to Murphy’s Irish Pub – an authentic Irish pub run by a real Irishman in the centre of Akashi. It was a nice little pub space, but the beers were pretty expensive – 650-900 yen a piece! That's $8-14 in Australia dollars for somewhere between a middie and a schooner. After we had our one beer each (Kirin, the cheapest) and some chicken and chips, we headed out in search of a slightly more reasonable beer. We asked the first people we saw where a pub might be, and after some confused discussion, asked for an izakaya instead. Turns out that we were standing right outside THEIR izakaya, so we headed in and sat down, not quite sure what to expect. It was brilliant, and we ended up making friends with the lady who

ran the place (think the landladyfrom Kung Fu Hustle), and her two sons that worked there. Prices were WAY better (500 yen for a longneck of Asahi superdry), and they were interested in trying to talk to us gaijin. They had almost no English, and it was fun to try to communicate in our bad Japanese. The walls of the place had bottles of sake owned by various people all over- you could buy your own bottle and leave it there to come back whenever you liked. It was a great place, and we’ll definitely be back if we can find it again.

Sam and I picked up some more bite-sized chocolates (and check out the prices on a karaoke place) on the way back to the train station at about 11:30 pm. Our train ended up being delayed due to “human injury incident”. I’m not sure if that means what I think it does, but it’s a bit sad.

All up, Akashi was pretty tops, and it definitely deserves a bit more exploring.

Food highlight of the day: Probably the konbe-yaki we got at the izakaya – konbe means pork, and konbeyaki was basically like a bacon omelette kind of thing. It was great!