Various things from a last week of travel

Burnout and baths in Japan, collecting collectables, and a ferry crossing

(My other pieces from this two month trip: Seoul stopover, Walking Vientiane, Walking Bangkok, Walking Phnom Penh, A hundred hours in Shanghai, Walking Japan: Fukuoka to Nagasaki )

I was about one hundred and twenty miles outside of Fukuoka, somewhere around Saga, or maybe it was Omachi or Kubota, when I realized I was done, and although I had another eight days until my flight back home, this trip was effectively over.

What had been intended as a two-month test run for staying longer in a city I’d admired (Hanoi) and thought I could see myself living in, at least long enough to re-write my novel, became instead a mad dash from Seoul to Vientiane to Bangkok to Phnom Penh to Shanghai to Fukuoka to then heading out for six days of fifteen-mile plus walks across the most populated, but the least scenic, part of Kyushu island carrying a twenty-five pound backpack during an unseasonable warm spell.

I was in the middle of a five-square-mile grid of rice fields that with all the irrigation canals, limited bridges, and power lines felt more like a child’s maze challenge from a paper placemat come to life, when my body gave out, and I barely made it to the train station four miles away.

My legs had gone wobbly on me an hour earlier and I started looking for anyplace to sit in the shade and rest, which I didn’t find because for reasons nobody has been able to explain to me, Japan, despite being very walk-able, doesn’t have public seating except in a few neighborhoods, and if you’re not in one those then your only option is to hike to a train station and sit there, and even then, a bench out of the sun is not a given.

Unlike in Taiwan, or Korea, the convenience stores in Japan are not an option for resting because they have largely eliminated any seating they once had, something I’ve been told accelerated during Covid, so while you can buy a packaged sandwich and a drink, you have to eat those standing up or while you walk because everyone else eats them in their cars, which they at least have the decency to do without the pollution from idling.

I did manage to find the only empty public bench, one of four I’d counted in the town, which as usual was in probably the least relaxing spot in a park that was empty beyond me and two others trying to eat their lunch.

If you travel much, you get used to these moments of being down, of a homesickness that for me manifests as a growing and at times overwhelming irritation at your surroundings. Why can’t the Japanese build better parks? Why is everything around me so boxy, rigid, and sterile?

I’ve learned to do my best to limit their impact by reminding myself I’m the guest, and anyways, no place is perfect, and to do my best to pivot to taking advantage of what a culture does best, and for this time in Japan, that was the public baths.

I’d only “discovered” the public baths a few days before, when I waited too long to book my room for a Saturday night, a big mistake in Japan, and had ended up at a fallen on hard times, but still very popular, at least with the elderly, ryokan. The traditional Japanese inn, usually built around a hot spring or thermal waters, which is what this one was, and the room I’d booked had no shower or bath.

Irritated I tried to put on the robe and sandals provided for walking to the baths four floors and two-hundred yards away, only to find they didn’t come anywhere close to fitting me, especially the sandals, which I couldn’t even put my foot into.

Almost every hotel in Japan, even the inexpensive business hotels I prefer, have public baths but I’d not used them before, not out of personal shyness, but because I didn’t know how to use them, and hate to feel like an elephant in a china shop, which the tiny slippers made me feel even more like. This time I had no choice, so I googled public bath etiquette, watched a few videos, and then marched down in a t-shirt, shorts, and bare socks hoping I wouldn’t be too embarrassing.

Fifteen minutes later, after a few tiny faux pas, I was scrubbed absolutely clean in a way I hadn’t been in months and neck deep in 108 degree sulfur-y water, my body cooking away weeks of accumulated knots, pains, bruises, strains, and grime, wondering how in the world I’d only managed to discover Japanese least hidden secret after three long trips.

I’d actually been to a ryokan before, and a public bath, when I was twelve, something I even wrote about after my last trip to Japan, which had then ended with me passing out in the hallway after steeping too long.

Perhaps that’s why I took so long to rediscover them, but once I did, I used them every day, once in the morning before walking and then again right after checking in. They are fantastic and almost every hotel has them, including my two favorite chains, Dormy Inn and Route Inn, both of which often have better baths (more refined, more scenic, more relaxing) than the high end inns.

The baths are the perfect example of what I wrote about last week, of despite Japan having adopted the modern, especially with buildings and appliances, there is still a strong tradition beneath the surface. The whole ritual of washing up while sitting on a small stool, of the three different tub each a different temperature, of all the written and unwritten rules of behavior, show a respect for the past as well as care for craftsmanship that is very Japanese. They are both social, and yet meditative. They are about as close to a redemptive elixir as I’ve found, especially after a day hard on the body. Almost everything about them, even in the small cheap hotels, is done with a care, thoughtfulness, and understanding, that allows you to wash away the built up dirt, grime, and anxiety. You go in a mess, and come out restored. I am now fanatical about them, and finding them turned my mood around 180 degrees.

If there is a take-home lesson here, it’s don’t necessarily trust me for advice, despite me being a life-long traveler, because if it took me this long to take advantage of something so obvious, and so special, then you have to wonder about the other things I am missing.

As a side note, the original ryokan I stayed in was a time-capsule of a glamorous slower past that seems to be gently fading away, despite Japans commitment to maintaining tradition. My stay included a full Japanese breakfast that was far more formal than I’d expected, with a comedic moment when I realized I had mistakenly booked a room for five rather than one, something I tried to correct when checking in, but because of language issues didn’t fully get fixed, so when I brought my ticket down for breakfast I found myself directed to a table with five place settings, five arranged meals, and one confused waitress.

I did my best not to waste too much of the food, after figuring out what I was supposed to do with all the different dishes. I also tried my best to explain to the waitress that I would be eating alone, and so she should give the four extra meals to someone who deserved them, but she didn’t understand and instead kept looking at me oddly, asking when the others would be down, and when I finally convinced her they wouldn’t I couldn’t help shake the feeling she thought I’d done something very very bad the night before that had driven away my family and I should be, or was, having a morning of deep shame.

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Pokémon and collectibles

After I realized I was done with my trip I spent the remaining five days in Japan finishing up the journey to Nagasaki via shorter walks supplemented by trains, and resting the best I could, as well as getting my now usual duffel bag of collectibles to bring home to my family. Well, really my middle daughter who has, ever since being introduced at the age of four to momentarily quiet her when we ate out, been obsessed with Pokémon for two decades.

She is a collector, and has always been, from when at three she used to arrange rocks she found in the playground on her bedroom shelf, treating each like a special member of a yet to be fully obtained line of geological collectables.

When I was back in Fukuoka I spent about three hours, after failing the day before, trying to find the Pokémon store there, which they don't advertise the location of, and was on the least accessible floor of a huge mall.

Yet, it was packed, to the point I had to stand in line on a Monday morning, and lots of the crowd were tourists, foreign and Japanese, who had come to this part of Kyushu island primarily to go to this store. That's one strong brand.

I hadn’t found the store the day before, although I knew I was close, because there was a live event at that store, some Pokémon Go thing, and they gave people who showed up and went (there was a four hour line at the mall entrance to get in) a Pikachu paper hat (like the burger king crown) and some inflatable Pokéball. Later that night, as I was walking to my hotel through the red light district I saw plenty of young women out front of their shops with absurdly short skirts, knee-high faux-leather boots, wearing the Pokémon hat and the Pokéball as accessories. Again, besides the dark humor, that’s one strong brand.

The next day, after finally making it to the store, where a very kind thirty-five year-old Dutch woman, who knew everything about Pokémon but didn’t collect for herself because if she did “she would never be able to stop” helped me figure out what I could get as a present that was special. Then I took a two-hour local train to a suburban mall next to huge factories, to a store that sold only Sylvanian Families, another Japanese brand that my daughter collects, where the young employee patiently walked me around find the hard stuff, the just-released and limited-edition boxes that seem to use their scarcity to justify bigger prices.

I’ve never been a collector, but I was a bond trader for twenty years and have written about markets, pricing, and emotions, and I see in collectibles a lot of similarities to other markets, especially the current craze with crypto.

I've always said bitcoin and other crypto markets are effectively analogous to collectible markets, although Pokemon has more tangible presence, even if that is a Pikachu stuffie with a particular smile.

I will write a longer piece about this eventually, but my personal theory on markets is that prices are driven by and support by myths. That is, the price of something traded on markets is a reflection of the dominant story (myth) being told about the thing being traded. Sometimes that story is constrained by its intrinsic and utilitarian value, what in finance is called the recovery value. For a companies stock that is the tangible assets you can sell if you ever dismantled the physical entity, for a bond it’s that as well as its price at maturity, and for art it is only the tiny residual value of the frame and canvas.

The rest of the value is set by the current myth, which is the collective belief of the buyers and sellers, and with Art, and collectibles, that is the vast majority of the value. For instance, a Pikachu stuffie with a particular smile, that you can only get in a Fukuoka mall, is worth ten times a different stuffie only because enough people believe it is. A story which currently happens to be true because there’s enough people like my daughter who want the complete set.

Another example of this is a baseball that claims to be connected to a famous event, like the ball Willie Mays caught on September 29, 1954, which is a thousand times more expensive than any other ball used in that game and hundreds of thousands from any other game despite there being no difference in the intrinsic value, because enough people want it, because that games significance, and that moment, has reached mythical importance in America.

Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value, not even the dollar cost of a wood frame and canvas like an art work has, or the dollar of fluff and fabric that a stuffie has. The value and the price, is entirely about people believing other people believe it has value.

What the Willie Mays ball, a Pokémon stuffie, and a Sylvanian Family little mouse in a skirt does have, which Bitcoin doesn’t, is a connection to a mythical moment or a cuteness factor, that you can argue has real value. Or to be an intellectual about it, they have an aura in the Walter Benjamin sense.

Bitcoin, at least at first glance, doesn’t seem to have an aura, but it does have a story, which is very political and ideological, and that story is the aura. You are making a political, or sociological statement when buying bitcoin, which is akin to the admission price for being accepted into a worldview. Talk to any dedicated bitcoin investor and you can see the outlines of a myth — the nebulous founder, the early dogged investors, the heroic quest to overthrow the corrupt and profane ordinary financial world and replace it with something more just and virtuous.

Those core and dedicated buyers are what, at least in theory, provides bitcoin with its “intrinsic” value, and pulls in the opportunists who know there’s a non-negligible number of believers in the myth (story), and so they will go along for the ride thinking they can time the market and get out if that support collapses.

The story you are buying when you buy a Wooper stuffie, like I did for my daughter, is clear, explicit, and out there to see in movies and TV shows, which has a huge fan base. When I finally got back to Seoul to rest before flying home, I walked into a vape store with my bags and the clerk pointed at the Wooper sticking out my duffel bag, there because I was entertaining my daughter by sending her shots of him (her?) from the last week of my trip.

The cover photo is him holding Wooper, and after the picture he asked me why a sixty year old guy was carrying around a stuffie and I explained I was bringing it to my daughter in the US and then he went to one of the shelves, where there was a line of small stuffies, took down one, and gave it to me to give to her.

Not a bad way to end my trip and another reminder just how strong the Pokéman brand is. Aura strong.

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Ferry to Busan

I’d decided to walk Kyushu island when I realized there was a ferry I could take from Fukuoka to Busan to return to Korea and my departing flight.

When I went on world wide trips with my parents, back in the 70s and 80s, my favorite memories were from the long boat trips we took, which felt special in a way airplanes didn’t.

I also looked forward to six hours out on the deck watching the waves go by, the sunset, and all the others ocean aesthetics I miss, but except for a brief ten minutes after boarding and before we left the dock, there was none of that since the crew, sighting high winds, locked all the doors, trapping us inside, which as I mentioned to my new Russian friend Alex, and bunk-mate, who was a marine safety engineer, didn’t seem very safe.

So for six hours I sat at a table in the cafeteria talking to Alex about Ukraine, the war,¹ life in Busan, shipping, engineering, and all sorts of things since he had spent over ten years traveling the world working on cargo ships.

It was funny talking to a guy who understood the US only from it’s ports, who had been to, and knew, Beaumont Texas but not St Louis, or Hampton Roads but not Chicago, and after he asked me about Trump and to explain the electoral college, I flirted with telling him that each state was allotted its EC votes based on its port traffic, and that Trump had won because he had embraced a pro cargo ship mandate, before I decided that wasn’t necessarily the nicest way to pass the time.

It also wasn’t fair because Alex was a good guy, who taught me a lot about international shipping, and had gone to Japan to buy two colossal electric keyboards because his passion, besides ship safety, was making techno music, some of which he played for me and the scattering of elderly Koreans sipping tea nearby.

Although we spent most of the trip talking, and I helped him carry his two keyboards off of the ship, we didn’t exchange numbers, because that’s one of the unwritten rules of these liminal spaces, that you overlap for six hours, become briefly very close, then you move on, like a friendship hook-up culture.

I did briefly try and nap on the thin futon in the shared room, although every time I got close to deep sleep, and the ship rolled a bit more than usual, I thought of the locked doors and that woke me up.

I also took Wooper selfies for my daughter, but other than that and meeting Alex, I was disappointed with the ride, which felt perfunctory and annoying long, although I suppose I was hoping to capture a little of that special feeling from when I was a child, which is a task bound to fail.

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Chicken Sashimi

“Freshly slaughtered chicken thighs and winter” was my last meal in Japan, and it was a mistake, because it meant uncooked chicken. I didn’t get sick from it, but I’m really scratching my head trying to think who wants to court illness to eat raw chicken, which tastes way way worse than the type where the food born illnesses have been cooked away. .

I ate it, because I was tired, had a long day ahead of me, and that’s the territory that comes with ordering things somewhat randomly. As they say, “Live by the sword, die by the uncooked chicken.”

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Manhole covers

During my two prior long walks in Japan I documented the sad playground and wonderful manhole covers I found.

This trip I didn’t take many pictures of the playgrounds, because there weren’t many, and because I was too tired, but I did take a picture of the one special manhole cover I noticed. I have others, but none come anywhere close to the Omura City Water & Sewage bureaus effort.

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Next trip

After two weeks at home I’ll be leaving for a week in Warsaw. I’ll be there from Dec 12th to the 19th, so if you happen to be there, please reach out to me in the comments.

My apologies for the this piece being a tad late, but I’d planned to write it on the fifteen-hour flight home, but given how crowded the flight was, and how far back the person in front of me leaned their seat, I literally couldn’t open my computer all the way and also I couldn’t type without my elbows flinging into the guy sleeping next to me. So instead I watched season three of Loudermilk, which isn’t as good as the prior two seasons, but I’m a sucker for slightly inappropriate humor, especially one about addiction and recovery.

Until next week!

1. Maybe I’ll write more on this eventually, but I came away even more depressed about the war than before. Russia has moved to paying young rural teenagers a huge (to them) up front sum ($50K) to join the military, telling them they probably won’t have to go to the Ukrainian front, although they all do, and that they will get $3k/month, so they join because they believe it is a way to help their families escape poverty and despair.

I understand few want to have sympathy with the Russian soldiers, but this war sucks for everyone involved, except for the few at the top who started it all.