Family Floating Time: Asahikawa Bright Spots

There were some bright spots to this gritty city including the well done Asahikawa City Museum where we took a deep dive into the indigenous Ainu culture, the Kamikawa Shrine, a surprisingly delightful pottery village, and some really good food.

Maya and I tried to eat at a little shack of a place but it didn’t work out so well. We walked into this tiny establishment where there were 4 seats at the bar and 2 little tables. We sat next to a lady who was chain smoking and nursing her own bottle of whisky. The sign on the wall outside said they had yakitori which is basically meat on a stick. Taking one look at us the bartender lady typed into her google translate and asked if we spoke Japanese. We cheerfully said no but we could use google translate. She and the drunk patron laughed….then she said “Are you ok with animal organ meats?” That’s a hard pass for us so we typed back, “how about non organ meat chicken or pork?”, which prompted more laughter between the two of them. She typed on her google translate for a few more moments and said “I’m sorry but we have a large reserved party coming in so we cannot serve you.” Ah ok got it. Too much of a language barrier, and some places just don’t want or need to deal with tourists so she was politely asking us to leave. We felt discouraged and so kept walking in the hunt for dinner.

This is fake food on display. Restaurants are really into their fake food here.

A real bowl of ramen

There’s a pottery village tucked in the corner of the city, a little spot of lush green heaven where carefully designed homes and dense gardens hide residential pottery shops. Most notable of them all was Potta, run by this beautiful artist whose work moved us to tears. It was quite the scene, I don’t know what happened in there but Maya and are were just overcome with emotion and we were gushing tears that we could not stop. We think this woman, her space, and creative energy reminded us of my mom in another life.

Our first visit to a Shinto shrine was at Kamikawa Shrine, built in 1883. There was a little sign at the purification fountain near the entrance explaining how to wash your hands (left first then right) and mouth.

Nora explained to us that these paper slips are fortunes called omikuji that one pulls from a box after making a donation to the shrine. If it’s a bad luck fortune you can tie it on a tree branch and leave your bad fortune behind. If it’s a good fortune you are supposed to keep it on your person for at least a year to increase your chances of it coming true.

We’ve heard thrifting is epic in Japan and American Core is a hot style…curated vintage stores sell random t shirts for $25 that resemble the ones in the rag pile in my garage. Bringing the trash bag of clothes currently found on my closet floor and designated for Goodwill could be a good way to make some money whole traveling in Japan. Raid your grandma’s closet for her old Charleston, SC sweatshirts.

We took a detour on the way back to Niseko to stop in Yoichi for a few sights, including our first conveyor belt sushi! The place was packed so we used the time we had to wait for a table to study the ordering system by watching what the other patrons did after they were seated.

See that little chart on the picture above? Different types of sushi cost a different amount and get a particular color plate. After the meal you pile up all of your plates and the guy comes by and scans the stack of plates. Presumably the plates are embedded with a microchip or a magnetic strip or something, the process is pretty cool. Vicki was very amused by how amazed I was. We ate an enormous quantity of all kinds of sushi and the bill came to a mere $36… for all four of us to be stuffed to the gills :)

We ended up with a LOT of plates because we didn’t quite understand the ordering system. You have to write the item number on a little ticket and how many orders of each kind you want. We thought there was just one piece of sushi in an order so we mistakenly ended up with multiples upon multiples of everything. The plates just kept coming and coming and coming. Just when we thought the last plate was being handed to us another one appeared. We managed to eat all of it! It was quite comical and so all we could do was try not to choke while we cracked up.