Japan: Toyama

After a brutal finals week and some supremely last minute packing (with help from Shannon), I left Saturday morning for a school trip to Japan. It was organized by the Japanese students in my class along with the help of several other classmates. 

My Uber Carpool Buddy, Diego, picked up Yumi and me. We made a stop for breakfast at Jack in the Box for our last taste of delicious (?) American food before meeting up with several other of our classmates at LAX. 

Diego and I checked in to our flight while we were procrastinating on studying for our Econ final at school on Friday and managed to get two seats next to each other. I was a very exciting seatmate as I slept the entire flight to Japan.

We flew with Yumi, one of the Japanese organizers. I played IM soccer with Yumi the last two quarters. The Japanese organizers were incredibly patient the whole trip and navigated us around and pretty much held our hands the whole time. Yumi managed to get all eight of us disoriented foreigners to the hotel very efficiently.

Once we dropped our bags off, we all headed back out to get some dinner. Yumi left to go meet up with friends and without her guidance we walked around aimlessly looking desperately for food. We eventually agreed on a ramen place.

Here are my jet lagged friends.

Vending machine type restaurants were incredibly common. We were warned about this but still could not figure out how to use it. We tried to match up the Japanese translation for the ramen we wanted to the button on the vending machine. It prints a ticket which you give to the waiters who cook it up for you. 

Ramen!

There were three different groups who went on the trip. There was an Education Policy track, a Reconstruction Policy track, and a Transportation Policy track. I went on the Transportation trip. We all split up Monday morning after the hotel breakfast and went to our respective cities. 

The Transportation team took tons of trains.

My group took the newest Shinkansen high speed rail train from Tokyo to Toyama. It is the Hokuriku Shinkansen, completed in 2015. The high speed rail goes up to 320 km per hour (almost 200 miles per hour). We got from Tokyo to Toyama in 2 hours and 16 minutes. Japanese trains are insanely punctual. I heard a statistic that said over the last fifty years the average train delay is less than one minute. I was on the trip with a bunch of transportation and policy nerds, so it was very fun because everyone was very interested and engaged in everything we were doing and I learned a lot!

We all played with this vending machine while we waited for our train. It scans your face and then recommends a drink based on whatever demographic information it gathers from your face. For me it suggested "English Tea".

We spent the train ride practicing our Japanese. 

View from the train!

Monday was a holiday in Japan so we spent the whole day sightseeing. We got schlepped around in a charter bus which was incredibly convenient as we had all of our luggage with us. 

Our first stop was the Shinminato Fish Market. 

They had our lunch already prepared for us when we arrived. We had a reservation at the restaurant. The Japanese students thought our reservation was really funny, so we had them explain the joke. One of the signs below has the name of our reservation, which was supposed to say "Luskin School" but it got misinterpreted as "Napkin School", so they joked about how we were getting our Masters in Napkin Folding. 

The motto for the trip was "Put it in your mouth and find out". I still have no idea what some of the food I ate was. Also, frequently, I tried to eat things on my plate that were not actually food and were just for decoration or to package the food. This food was sashimi, which is raw fish. And since we were at the fish market it was incredibly fresh! We were spoiled food wise and every meal was served with endless appetizers and sides and main dishes. I asked a girl who went on this trip last year what it was like before I went and her reply was "I was never hungry." Now I understand what she meant by that. We were being constantly fed delicious unidentifiable food. 

After lunch we shopped around the market that had not only fish, but fish themed souvenir shops as well.

 This is a fish shaped pastry stuffed with a slightly sweet red bean paste. I really liked it!

Our next stop was the Wakatsuru Sake Brewery. We got a tour of the brewery and then got to taste a variety of sakes.

 I thought we were drinking $300 sake until someone informed me that the conversion rate is divide by 100 not by 10 and suddenly the trip seemed a whole lot cheaper. My favorite thing I tried though was the plum wine. It tasted kind of like a riesling. 

Dennis asked how to say "no more please" in Japanese as he kept being offered more sake samples. Our Japanese friends instead taught him how to say "one more please".

After the sake brewery we went to Gokayama Village. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, tucked in the mountains behind Toyama. Gokayama was easily my favorite touristy thing we did. It was a beautiful village. Toyama and especially Gokayama are two places that I would not have either thought to have gone to or been able to get to had I gone to Japan by myself so I am especially grateful we had the opportunity to go there. I loved Toyama as well.

 Bus ride to Gokayama

All us Californians turned into children as soon as we were in the vicinity of snow and it was so much fun. 

 Taro hurling a snowball.

David building a snowman.

The Luskin Boy Band, album dropping 2017.

 There was a souvenir shop in the village and we spent a decent amount of our stop in Gokayama playing with all of the toys at the souvenir shop. 

It was a quiet bus ride back to the hotel. We stayed at a traditional Japanese hotel called Toyama Kanko Hotel. 

The hotel rooms look like this when we arrived. Just a room with some chairs. No beds. They provided us all Yukatas (cotton Kimonos) and slippers which we wore around the hotel. We had a break to have some green tea.

 I asked them all to smile for the camera. It had been a long day. 

We were served dinner in the hotel. 

Another segment in the adventures of "Put it in your mouth and find out."

When we got back to our room after dinner our beds had been set up for us! They were just mats but surprisingly very comfortable!

 But then again, that may have just been the jet lag.

The hotel rooms did not have showers. However, the hotel had a hot spring. Wendy and I went and soaked in the hot springs for like five minutes before it felt like we were boiling alive and then used the communal showers provided in the hot springs room.

Despite still being full from the dinner before, we woke up the next morning to another delicious and overwhelming amount of food. 

Our first stop on Tuesday was Toyama City Hall.

We first went up to the top of city hall to the observatory. 

Toyama has stunning snow capped mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. Toyama is on the west coast of Japan so it was a little colder than Tokyo, but luckily we had come prepared! 

We got to learn about Toyama's plan for revitalizing the city center and the use of public transportation in doing so. Our organizers hired us a translator for our trip. Her name was Yoko and she was very sweet. She translated presentations into English and translated our questions into Japanese. 

 Listening intently. 

 We are each in charge of one meeting for the trip. That means we write the report on that segment for the final report we will present to the school and the thank you notes and gifts associated with that meeting. Toyama City Hall was the one I was in charge of. I gave a short thank you speech at the end and presented a box of Sees Chocolates to the presenter as a thank you gift. Arigatou Gozaimasu (formal thank you) was the most handy phrase I learned on the trip!

We then went out to lunch at a restaurant overlooking Toyama. 

 Reid liked to sit near me during meals so that he could eat all of the food that I didn't want. Generally that was only any sort of cow or pig product or anything I could not finish due to sheer volume. 

There were piano stairs in the building we ate lunch in. We ran up and down the stairs repeatedly. Here I am helping Wendy play Fur Elise by playing the last note that she could not reach.

Vending machines were EVERYWHERE in Japan. They all sold pretty much the same products too. All of us caffeine dependent graduate students kept making our organizers stop so we could buy $1 cans of tiny sugar filled coffees. They even came out of the vending machine hot! 

After lunch we went to the tram inspector. We got to learn about the engineering differences between light rails and traditional subways and some of the benefits of the light rail systems. 

We then got to ride the tram to the central train station so we could catch our next train back across Japan to Nagoya.