Coming down off Mt. Inasa it was an hour past the universal Japanese check-in time and my chances at landing a room were diminishing by the minute. Of more immediate importance was that I felt disgusting after the hike and probably looked it too--the shirt was drying off slowly, but those ubiquitous salty sweat streaks were appearing in spots. I crossed the river again and intersected Nagasaki's main waterfront thoroughfare, Urakami Street, a.k.a. Route 206, and started walking north, towards Nagasaki Medical University, the Peace Park and the general "outskirts". But damn did my legs burn and thighs chafe. Without getting too intimate, I wasn't wearing my walking undies today and was starting to pay for it. Anyways, Nagasaki's expansive streetcar system that SF's F-Line totally ripped off runs Urakami north to south so I hopped on and rode for all of five all-too-short minutes before relieving the frightened passengers of my presence at the University station. For the record, Nagasaki has the best public transit of any Japanese non-megalopolis that I've seen so far. The streetcars are so numerous and frequent one has to wonder if Nagasaki has agents around the world snapping up vintage cars. And the bus system, oh man--on any street that's not an outright alley you'll have a bus sneaking up on you from behind or charging from ahead. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!
Streetcar mania! F-Line MUNI eat your heart out...this is how it's done!
There are five hotels in the neighborhood adjacent to the university and two of them are priced way over my means. After asking around the remaining three I had bupkis. All full for the festival. Mind you, this isn't downtown and there are no medical conferences on the Kunchi weekend according to the bulletin board in front of the campus. Gradually, sitting on some steps with an ice cream and onigiri, I was resigning myself to another Osaka '04 experience where I ran out of cash and had to sleep on the Dotombori-bashi. I'm still getting drinks off that story though, so maybe this happenstance would be equally as drama-charged. Hell, I'd already found the perfect place to sleep--the Lion's Club cemetery across the river--all I needed was a tarp and sleeping bag.
Nagasaki Station in the twilight. Ain't it purdy?
Before giving up I headed towards Nagasaki Station again, remembering a bank of hotels in that area that looked expensive, but you never know. The Washington and Dai-Ichi were priced right but booked, naturally, being directly in front of the station. I plied the back alleys and found one place that looked great yet...intimidating. I don't know what this hotel's gimmick was--it was small enough to be a bargain basement "business hotel", but looked really, really nice and had a lot of scary types hanging around it. I wrote it off walking by the first time, got half a block and wondered why I didn't even try, headed back for another pass and just froze. It's like I'm in seventh grade again and can't ask Adrianne What's-her-face to the dance. This happened, seriously, five times. The smokers out front must have thought me mad. The upside to this farce was that I did have the courage to walk into the excellent mom-n'-pop bakery across the street and pick up Nagasaki Castella cake for my friends as presents when I got back home.
Then, two blocks away from Le Hotel Terror, I found it: the narrowest hotel ever, and my salvation. I should have taken a picture out front it was so comical. The place couldn't have been wider than twenty feet and was five stories tall, and perhaps it was by this ultra-slim profile that ordinary people missed it because there were vacant rooms. Score! Actually, double score, I got a kitschy little Western-tatami hybrid room. Spreading out the tatami the width of the room and laying down my head and feet were almost in contact with the walls. I took a shower and rested my muscles while watching the drama-filled Gamba Osaka football game until the 6 PM siren roused me and I headed out for a kick ass night on the town.
My Western-tatami room at Hotel Knife Edge. By the way, the patrons here were equally as scary as Le Hotel Terror, with one confirmed Yakuza spotted in the lobby when I was checking out.
Nagasaki's main nighlife spots are focused around the Shianbashi and Nishihama neighborhoods, located inland a bit over a kilometer away from the station. It's definitely an exciting, fun place to walk around, but it lacks the charged, circus-like atmosphere of Oita's Miyako-machi, which was disappointing. Still, the magnet in my brain that uncannily steers me towards the bizarre and interesting didn't fail me and my first stop was, oddly enough, a cup of coffee at the single most awesome cafe I have ever seen: a Regan-era kei-type delivery van parked in a back alley, in front of a hair salon. I ordered a $3 cup of coffee equivalent in size to a "tall" and took a seat and read a bit from the book I'd just picked up at a bookstore, Tokyo Underworld. Five minutes passed and I was wondering why pouring a cup of coffee was taking so damn long until I realized he was making it with a coffee siphon. The coffee was the single most perfect cup I've ever had--I don't know what his secret was, but I told him so and that I'd be back every time I come to Nagasaki, so don't move the van.
Who'd have thunkit...the best cup of coffee I've ever had came out of a 50 hp blue van in a Nagasaki alley.
Next stop, something to properly fill my stomach and a beer, because I've earned it today. In fact, I've earned a bunch of beers today. I was really looking forward to Nagasaki's famous Chanpon, a Chinese-inspired noodle soup served with seafood, meat and veggies, but it had to be the "real deal" and I just didn't think anyplace looked authentic enough, whatever that means. So I gave up that dream for the night and ducked into a super-duper-seedy yakitori joint. There were no windows, no menus and no stopping the cooks of disparate ages in the kitchen behind the bar where I was sitting. I alternated between eating, drinking, reading and watching them for the better part of an hour and not once did I see one of them slow down or wander off. I was having a good time until a drunken patron started gibbering to me. I couldn't understand his slurred Japanese except when he started talking about how I should lay a Nagasaki chick so I payed the bill and ducked into some kind of subterranean passageway where a guy was selling pork buns. Very surreal.
Aimlessly wandering Shianbashi I found a well lit narrow bar with white plaster walls covered by autographs and messages, self-serve bar snacks and a lot of bottles of really premium shōchū that I'd never seen before--none of that Nashika crap here. My mind was boggled, so I got another beer and chatted with the bartender a little then took off. There was another American guy in the bar who was giving me strange, uncomfortable looks too. There's a weird vibe with some Westerners in Japan that gravitates between camaraderie and revulsion for reasons too complicated to explain here, and sometimes it's tough to figure out where on the spectrum a given person might occupy. Ask me about it in person sometime, it's better explained face-to-face.
The Shōchū Bar in Shianbashi: a good place to cop a cheap feel on someone who won't suspect it's anything other then a byproduct of the place just being so damn cramped. Oh, it's got good drinks and customer service too.
Moving on I stumbled on Nagasaki's Chinatown, a gaudy, LED strewn handful of blocks with nothing but pricey Hong Kong-style restaurants and herb shops. In fact, there's no action to be had inside Nagasaki Chinatown at all, it's all happening at its riverside periphery where the yatai (portable food stands) set up shop. I hunkered down at one and proceeded to, at first, terrify the operators and their clients. But when I bought a big bottle of beer, started pouring for everyone
and demonstrated my mastery of basic, elementary school-level Japanese they fell like dominoes. The conversation turned weird when they asked me what I do and I returned the question, with the man in the suit next to me saying he worked as a shipbuilder for Mitsubishi on the south side of town. The guy next to him though, attired in a blue jumpsuit said he worked in construction and soon after got up and went to another stall. "He's not in construction," said the stall owner's wife, "he's a 'boss' in Nagasaki." He was a gang boss, she meant. I may have been pouring beers to a Yakuza boss.
I went somewhere after the stall, maybe to get more to eat since the yatai had disappointed me by being out of butabara skewers and the earlier yakitori shop didn't fill me up. I'm a little fuzzy though since about half of the things I've put in my stomach in the entire day had been beer. Oh, that's right, I didn't get anything to eat, I chased cats around the police station. Thankfully it was late or I might have found myself the object of questioning. Stumbling back to my hovel of a hotel (did I mention it was only $40 despite being in the heart of Nagasaki?) I watched some summer action blockbuster from my youth dubbed in Japanese and fell asleep.
Next I'll tell you about the actual festival I came for in the first place.
--Matt
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