Day 5: the fast train to Ishinomaki

Navigating the byzantine Tokyo station and its ramen “street” is fun, if a little bit more of a game of chance than skill.

First, you need to know that Tokyo Station is huge and surrounded by shopping malls and food courts. Signage in English is limited and more general, like “food and shops this way,” which is helpful to send you in the general direction of what you want, but not enough to get you to a specific store or restaurant you might be looking for. The same is true for locating the platform for your train. There are many local trains and Shinkansen (high-speed trains), but not all gates serve all lines. There are many words to describe your train, but none are explained. For example, we’re heading to Ishinomaki; our first train takes us from Tokyo to Sendai. Google maps will identify the line as Tohoku-Hokkaido Shinkansen, the direction is shown as “Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto,” Hokuto being the last station on the line as I discovered while scanning the many stops the train makes; the name of the train being “Hayabusa” (or so I guessed as there’s really nothing explaining what it means); departing at 13:20 from platform 22. We know from our ticket that our train number is “Hayabusa23”. The good news is that “Tohoku” and “Hokkaido” are on the signage next to a JR logo (the rail company), but they aren’t written in the same order or the same way as on Google Maps or on our ticket. There’s probably a description of the system and each of these terms somewhere, but we’ve yet to find it.

In the end, with a bit of luck and a lot of analyzing the signage and looking for anything pointing to platform 22, we found a train listing “Hayabusa23” and our car number. It was still a little worrisome that there were two trains back-to-back on the same platform, but at some point, you have to take a plunge, and if enough details seem right, you have to board that train and hope for the best.

Our breakfast plan was to stop on what’s called “ramen street,” but should more aptly be called ramen corridor, as it’s a small corridor in the food section of the shopping center under the station. We found the highest-rated location and joined the line. You’ve read correctly: at 11:00, there’s a line at multiple ramen restaurants in the station. At our feet, there’s a sign indicating wait time (it says 45 minutes). We expected to wait a very long time to reach the machine to order our meal, but within 20 minutes, the line attendant directed us to it to pick up our tickets. We picked a little at random, since the button only shows pictures of ramen with a price and a short Japanese name (which we do not read or understand). With our ticket in hand, we got back in line and were seated within 5 minutes, beating the expected time by a good 20 minutes. The attendant took part of our ticket and, I guess, gave it to the kitchen. Within another 5 minutes, we had a bowl of cold ramen noodles with a soft-boiled egg on one side, and a bowl of warm broth with pork and bamboo shoots on the other. We weren't expecting the IKEA version of ramen, but there was no way to change our minds. Most people seemed to be having the same thing as us, dunking their cold noodles in the hot broth and taking some cold noodles straight as well. I dunked it all through the broth, which quickly grew lukewarm. Still, it was tasty if very salty. Total time spent from line to exit: 44 minutes. It’s a very efficient operation, and it makes me believe the 45 minutes in the line was the time you would be out of the restaurants, which is a very impressive prediction.

Our ride to Ishinomaki was uneventful and smooth. The train system here is unparalleled in its punctuality and efficiency. We disembarked one stop before Ishinomaki Station, since the walk from that station is about 10 minutes shorter than from the central station. This should have raised warning bells about the placement of our hotel, but, being the blissful vacationers that we were, we found it quaint to walk down the middle of small residential streets, with hardly a soul in sight. When I say the streets are small, I mean two cars cannot pass each other without one of them coming dangerously close to driving in somebody’s front yard. It took us a good 20 minutes to get to our hotel. During that walk, the only commerce we saw was a gas station, and when we got to our hotel, we kinda understood why. You see, our hotel is named the “Route Inn,” as in “next to the road”-on your route, kinda place. Across the road is a Mazda car dealer, and we’re on the main road into town. We’re officially in the suburb of the suburb, also known as the middle of nowhere.

Checking into our hotel was no small task. The hotel might say it accepts Visa or MasterCard, but it only accepts Japanese Visa and MasterCard. For us, this means cash is the only way to pay. Luckily, we had read about this being a possible issue in restaurants and made sure to carry hard currency, but paying for the hotel left our cash reserves a little low. This marked the start of the great ATM search of 2019. As with our hotel and some restaurants, most ATM will not accept international cards. We knew from experience that Seven Eleven Bank ATMs (yes, there is such a thing as a convenience store bank) worked well, but none seemed nearby. As our hotel is a 30-minute walk from “downtown” Ishinomaki, we decided to walk along the main road and stop at any place that seemed to have an ATM. For us, it ended up being two convenience stores and a grocery store before we found a Family Mart (a local convenience store chain) with an ATM that accepted foreign cards. I must admit, we were relieved when that happened; we were contemplating eating ramen morning, noon, and night for the next two days, as it was the only affordable food we were sure we could find.

With our cash reserves replenished, we finished our stroll into town, stopped at a Yakitori (grilled skewered meat) restaurant, and had dinner, ordering from pictures. Nobody spoke English further than counting to ten and saying please and thank you. We spoke less Japanese than they spoke English. Karine’s legendary point-and-smile skills got us some surprisingly good grilled beef bits, chicken skewers with an assortment of mystery sauces like “green spicy,” “not entirely unlike tartare sauce,” and “weird red,” and assorted fried skewers, including pork, chicken, quail eggs, mushrooms, and onions. Why putting a series of hard-boiled quail eggs on a skewer and frying them was a good idea, I don’t know.

Tomorrow we’re visiting Tashirojima - cat island - and hoping it will make our trek to the middle of nowhere worth it. We love cats, so chances are good. Very few pictures to accompany today, but tomorrow we should make up for it and increase the number of cat pictures on the internet.