How parts of the city still are, but much more how they once were.
An old, cluttered and dirty Japanese inn
The traditional Japanese ryokan, or inn, is usually portrayed as a place of minimalist charm and old school tranquility. An ideal location to escape the stress of the modern world and luxuriate in beautiful surroundings, hot baths and elaborate meals.
Now, no matter how romanticised some aspects of Japanese culture can be, there’s a lot of truth in that image, and they genuinely are lovely places to stay. Just as common and far less expensive, however, is the similarly timeless but much less exclusive variety of ryokan frequented by the likes of travelling salesman and construction workers. Cheap and cheerful lodgings that are there to serve a practical purpose rather than pander. And just like when it comes to bars, it’s the grubby, back to basics variety of inn that I purposely seek out, as at the end of the day, they are simply more interesting. So the rougher looking the better, and the worse the reviews, the more tempting they become, although invariably it’s the exterior on Street View that turns out to be the deciding factor, as websites for such places are few and far between. In fact mostly it’s just a simple listing with the address, price and a telephone/fax number for bookings.
Below then is one such business. Accommodation that may well have ample reading material, a genuinely varied array of stuffed animals, and clutter one can do little more than marvel at, yet it’s still unlikely to get much coverage in any of the ‘best places to stay in Japan’ articles.
Traditional little Tokyo bar looks
With Tokyo hosting the Olympics next summer, the city’s rapid pace of change seems to be even more pronounced, and yet for all its transformations, some things, somehow, remain more or less the same.
An old bar, on a hot day, before opening time
A moment of calm, as well as a chance to cool down, before the cooking and general conviviality commences.
Ban’ei, Hokkaido’s unique form of horse racing
Japan boasts a whole host of conventional racecourses, but Hokkaido’s Ban’ei Tokachi has just the one. With an origin in agricultural work, ban’ei involves huge draft horses pulling weights of up to a tonne along a 200 metre gravel track. An already arduous task that’s made all the more difficult by a couple of hill-shaped obstacles that slow proceedings down even further. In fact the race often comes to a standstill, as readjustments in direction are made, or the horses are braced before taking on the mounds — the sheer effort of which is hard to capture in a photo, especially from a distance, so for something of a taster, there’s a race video here.
This unusually slow pace also means that spectators can jog along at the side of the track to keep up with the race, although they are, somewhat half-heartedly, encouraged not to.
Starting out as an event at local festivals, the popularity of ban’ei grew to such an extent that in 1953, four racecourses were built. A business that eventually turned out to be unsustainable, and in 2007, the courses at Kitami, Asahikawa and Iwamizawa sadly closed down, leaving just the one at Obihiro.
Spending a good few hours there, it was interesting to see the number of punters ebb and flow. Visitors to the area clearly help enormously in keeping the enterprise viable, but like most forms of gambling, it has its hardcore fanbase. Old fellas mostly, who, like gamblers the world over, are there through thick and thin. Each and every time hoping, against all the odds, for that one last hurrah.
