"Boy For...I Mean, Bananas For Sale!"

“Maia and I needed some bananas in bulk, so we thought we'd head to a banana auction at Moji Station and snatch up a bushel.”

...Is how I'd like to begin this post, but it's just short of the truth and my conscience gnaws at me, so none of that. Well, the banana auction bit is true.

Maia and I traveled the rails last week none-too-far from her new home in Kitakyushu to the old port town of Moji, now a bustling tourist trap. This is the same Moji I mentioned in a previous post with the station—the northernmost one in Kyushu—that is a replica (of a piece) of Rome's Termini Station. The station and a handful of surrounding buildings form the core of “Moji Retro Town”, a sort of softcore attempt to replicate the setting in the town's heyday of the first couple of decades of the 20th century when troops departed here to pilla...I mean liberate Korea and Manchuria. It also hosted Albert Fucking Einstein in the 20s for a brief time. It's a nice place and would have been nicer had we not come on a day when the rain WOULD NOT STOP FOR A DAMN SECOND! Oh, and the retro mood was a little bit ruined by the, uh, 35-floor ultra-modern skyscraper in the middle of the town.

Food-wise the area boasts more types of yaki-curry/sq.km than any place in Japan. Yaki-curry, in case you're wondering, is just plain, banal curry n' rice served in a superheated stone bowl with a raw egg cracked on top. For curry lovers the dish is anything but banal though as it allows you to either leave everything be and let the bowl keep your dish hot, or mix it all up and eat a sort of curry/rice/egg goulash, or you could mash the rice hard against the stone walls and toast that to a burnt, crusty consistency, or you could...actually, that's about it unless you count tossing it all onto the floor as an option.

And then there's the bananas. According to lore, Moji was the primary entry point for bananas from Southeast Asia for many years, or enough for them to make a song about it, “Banana no tatakiuri” (“Bananas for sale”). Can't say for sure if bananas still come in through Moji, but October brings a month-long banana festival that we caught a taste of. Exiting the train we were met by a terrific cacophony from the station's entrance that turned out to be a banana barker hawking huge bushels of bananas that nobody short of a Jamba Juice franchise could possibly use before they spoiled. “Auction” might not be the best word to describe the activity though as there was no bidding war, the barker would just sing the “Banana no tatakiuri” song while banging a bat on a table then stop suddenly at a random verse and yell out a price, the first person to raise their hand being the winner.

Moving on from that we found a dance competition in the town square going on with booty shakers of all ilks mingling to the fresh beats of...Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters? Yeah, we happened to stumble by when a couple of dancers were doing a routine to the themes from both movies. We were hoping for some Top Gun “Highway to the Danger Zone”, but alas it was not to be. Instead we entered the skyscraper and went up to the top floor observation deck for drinks and the view.

Moji lies at the mouth of the Kanmon Straight, which, at its narrowest point has only about a kilometer gap with Honshu. It's so narrow they tunneled under the sea to connect the two with a roadway and footpath, apparently the only underwater footpath linking two such islands in the world. Guess where we went after the skyscraper! It takes about ten minutes to walk from one side to the other and, boom, you're in Shimonoseki on Honshu. We walked there, left the station, looked around and realized there was absolutely nothing to do on that side and promptly walked back through the tunnel. Total time spent in Honshu: three minutes.

The weather was miserable so we decided to head home, but we'll be back to explore Retro Town in full when the heavens stop pissing on us—literally and figuratively.

--Matt