Frank took a business trip to Hokkaido, Japan last week, and agreed to let me share his ramen-powered Sapporo adventure.
Hi, Sweetie:
Here I am in Hokkaido, safe and sound. The flights from the
US were uneventful, the usual trans-pacific 12 hour drag, and after a decent
layover, I made the connection to the domestic ANA flight within Japan to Sapporo’s International Airport (actually Shin
Chitose International Airport, about 20 miles south of Sapporo) with no
trouble.
Actually, I take that back; there was a bit of trouble – I
forgot to take my leftover Yen from the currency drawer at home, so I got to
Sapporo at 9 pm with only US$ in hand, and by then the foreign exchange office
was closed. I thought I might be stuck, but I asked at the information counter,
and they directed me to a hidden row of ATMs, which took some time to find. Fortunately, they worked, and I could withdraw Japanese cash and be on my way.
But not without noticing that the Sapporo International airport is HUGE – giant
shopping malls (all closed at this time of night), and 4 floors of long curved corridors
that go on forever. By the time I found the ATM, I’d walked nearly a half mile.
Not quite what I wanted after traveling for nearly 20 hours.
The JR train station was in the airport basement, and once I
got my ticket a train was ready to depart in a few minutes. The train was
comfortable (all seats, not a sand-up commuter train), and, and in half an hour
I was in town at the Shin Sapporo station.
The conference hotel was only a block from the station – I
had a great printout from Google maps, showing the area in great detail – but
to get out of the station I had to go through a maze of twisting shopping
passages (all closed at this time of night) and a bridge to a back alley for
bicycle parking before I finally found the tower of the Sheraton Sapporo Hotel in front of me. What a welcome sight that was. Even if it did
look like a mini European cathedral from this end – clearly a hotel with an eye
to the wedding market.
I checked in and the porter led me up the elevator to the 25th
floor. The room was a typical Japanese Western style hotel room – 2 beds,
bathroom with a small but deep tub, desk area (with Ethernet cable), flat
screen TV, mini-bar, and a tiny dresser with not enough drawers. That wasn’t
really a problem - I simply unpacked by dumping my suitcase out onto the 2nd
bed and used that as my dresser. As you know, I don’t mind a bit of
clutter, and I was tired.
After a nice hot bath – really necessary after a long,
dehydrating flight – it was straight into bed and I was out fast.
But not for long – the usual westbound Asian jetlag wakeup
at 2 AM kicked in, but I was able to force myself to snooze at least until 4
AM, when I was wide awake with no hope of return. I read a bit more of the John
Grisham book I brought for the flight, then finally opened up the laptop and
got my presentation finalized for the conference.
6:30 am and sunrise was coming outside the window, and I
could look out over Hokkaido. My room faced north, so in the distance I could
see banks of clouds hovering over the mountains. Although I’ve been to Japan
countless times for business and sightseeing, business never took me to
Hokkaido before, so this is something new. And it seems a little different –
the streets below are wide, straight and spacious, there was a lot of empty
space as the town changed into agricultural land in the distance. A Japanese
frontier city, if there is such a thing.
Hokkaido is the northernmost major island in Japan, and
although it’s at the same latitude as Chicago, it gets freezing blasts of air
from Siberia, and it’s famous for harsh winter cold and piles of snow. Too cold
for routine rice production, it was viewed as a wild wasteland by the more
cultured civilizations of Kyoto and Edo, and was left to the Ainu indigenous
people long after they were driven out of the other Japanese islands. So,
Hokkaido was only settled recently by Japanese. The whole of Hokkaido has only
6 million people, less than some districts of Tokyo. I gather that, if you rent
a car, there are large stretches of road here where you see no other cars or
people – real wide open spaces of the Japanese frontier. Not the typical image
of Japan, to say the least.
But, I didn’t rent a car, and 1/3 of those 6M people live in
Sapporo, so up close it feels like your typical Japanese city, with rows of
apartment blocks, towering office buildings, huge department stores and a great
rail and subway network to get around.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. By 7 am the Café Dom - down
by the fake mini-cathedral (Dom is German for Cathedral) - was open, and I had
the breakfast buffet (almost dinnertime b y my body clock, and I was hungry),
then went to register for the conference. I won’t bore you with those details,
other than to say that, as Chairman of the US sister conference, the conference
managers were very nice and respectful to me, inviting me to join the Steering
committee lunch and made many introductions.
At the end of the day, dusk was falling, and I cut out on
the last talks to catch the subway into the center of Sapporo
proper. It would be a shame to come all this way and not see anything of the
place itself, even though, by 4:30 pm, night was falling and I couldn’t see
much. Fortunately, it’s easy to get around. I got out of the subway at Odori
Park, and found myself in a grid of streets. Sapporo was laid out after Western
influence came to Japan, and the streets are not only a grid but are all
labeled with numbers – intersections are marked with signs like “North 1 West
2”, unlike Tokyo, where streets have no names and you stumble around by knowing
landmarks.
So here I was, but I was not sure what all to actually do –
Sapporo seems most famous for its winter Snow Festivals, with snow sculptures
and ice carvings and winter lighting in the Odori park. But this was too early
in the season for that.
I decided to make my first stop the famous Sapporo Clock Tower. It’s the symbol of the city, and
photos of it were on all the city information I had. It’s the oldest building
in Sapporo, and as I came up to it, I almost missed it, it was so dwarfed by
the towering hotels and office towers nearby. It was all lit up in the evening,
but I arrived to late to get in, so I just walked around the intimate grounds
and took a few photos.
It seemed very out of place - an odd transplant from the
American prairie into the heart of a Japanese city. The style is so familiar,
one that could fit into any of a thousand American towns, especially where my
family grew up in Kansas. So it seemed especially odd to find this at the
spiritual heart of a Japanese city.
But, the history makes things clear. Soon after Japan
started opening up to the West in the 19th century, and when Sapporo
was an infant town of a few thousand people, some Americans
from Univ. Massachusetts Amherst came to Sapporo and had a vision of making an
agricultural college in the Japanese North. They founded the Hokkaido
Agricultural College (now Hokkaido University), and one of the first buildings
they put up in 1876 was this American frontier style building with a clock from
Boston in its tower. The clock has been keeping time ever since.
After the history lesson, it was time to move on. I was only
wearing my suit from the conference, and the cold was beginning to get to me.
And I was getting hungry. In the local tourist information on Sapporo, Ramen was described as a big deal here. With the
winter cold, Hokkaido had made a name for itself with lots of varieties of
ramen, and not just the wimpy noodles and weak soy broth of Tokyo, but hearty
warm-you-up-on-a-cold-winter-day-when-you-need-to-shovel-2-kilometers-of-driveway
noodles, made with a thick miso broth.
So, I set my next mission to find good Sapporo Ramen as I
meandered my way towards the Sapporo JR station. Somewhere near the station,
there were supposed to be ramen specialty streets, with shop after shop of
noodles, but I wasn’t finding them. Instead, I was simply getting cold. It was
now below freezing, with a few flakes of snow falling. Everyone else was
walking around in real winter coats – they’re clearly serious about winter
here, and I didn’t pack enough
As I neared the JR station, I did see a huge Bic Camera (ビックーカメラ ) store,
and it reminded me that my Region 2 (Japan) DVD player at home (bought at Bic
Camera in Tokyo) had quit working. This would be a chance to get a replacement,
and since I didn't know when I’d be in Japan again, I thought I’d better check
it out. After all, how else will we be able to play all my Japanese anime DVDs?
Surely you’ve been missing that too, yes?
So, as I got into the elevator and began to look at the
floor guide, I see that the 10th floor (the restaurant floor for this building) is dominated by Sapporo Ramen
Kyowakoku (札幌ら〜めん共和国 ), one of the ramen
restaurants advertised in my “about Sapporo” pamphlet. What luck! And, as it
turns out, this is kind of a theme park of Ramen, with 8 restaurants that are
selected branches of ramen shops in their respective cities from around
Hokkaido. They stay or are replaced by popular vote, so, this may turn out to
be the place to sample some of the best ramen from all over Hokkaido.
I slipped into the restaurant closest to the entrance, which
turned out to be a shop from Ashikawa City (
旭川市 ), in the central region of
Hokkaido. After puzzling over the menu a bit, I ordered the mountain vegetables
in miso ramen.
I was not disappointed. This was good, hearty ramen, with
thick noodles and big vegetable chunks. A bigger bowl than I’m used to, and
warm and delicious! The perfect thing to fight off the chill air outside. All
complemented by a glass of beer – Sapporo brand, of course. And all for ¥1200.
Back down the elevator, fortified by ramen, I was ready to
enter the world of Bic Camera. This electronics super store is like many of the
famous Japanese stores, with floors dedicated to computers, to TVs, to washing
machines, etc., but has this jingle playing over the PA system that infects the
mind as it plays incessantly in the background, hypnotizing shoppers into
buying unnecessary electronics. You can find this jingle
on YouTube if you dare expose your brain cells to its hypnotic spell…
I found the portable DVD players on the 2nd
floor, and eventually pick a mid-priced Toshiba portable. There is some
confusion at the register, since I want to pay with American Express, and the
clerk wants to make some point, but I don’t understand. He opens up an English
phrase handbook for clerks, and the point he is trying to make is “we only
accept single payment”, which I don’t understand at all – “Is there a problem
with the credit card? I have Visa…or do you need cash?” I tell him in Japanese,
but he continues to point to this English phrase. I am stumped, since I don’t
really have a clue what’s going on. After another clerk asks the guy what’s
happening, he nods and proceeds to charge the American Express. OK… at least I
got my player.
I also picked up a couple bargain bin DVDs to make sure the
player works: アニー (Annie), since our
son is “studying” that in school, and 第三の男 (The Third Man) with Orson Wells since it was
just so cheap (¥440, or just under $5).
At this point, it’s 9 pm and I’m tired. Jetlag is telling me
I should be ASLEEP, and so I find the JR tracks, buy my ticket for Shin
Sapporo, and head back to the hotel. After another hot bath, and a quick check
of the DVD player, once I get this written, I expect I’ll be out like a light.
Tomorrow, a pretty dull day – breakfast, more of the
conference, a train ride to the Airport, a short hop to Narita and the long
flight overnight home.
See you soon, stay warm and happy!
Frank
