Not much to tell, since the whole day was devoted to check out of my hotel in Rishiri, taking the ferry to Wakkanai, buying my train ticket from Wakkanai to Chitose, and checking in at my Wakkanai hotel.
But somewhere in between I had to get lunch, and I felt it was time for me to brave this foreign world, find an eatery, and successfully negotiate the ordering of lunch. In the back of my mind I had the echo of a lesson I learnt 15 years ago in my first visit to Japan. In 1600, the Emperor decided to move the capital of the empire from its millenary seat, Kyoto, to the coastal palace of Edo, which at the time was poorly suited to receive an enormous influx of bureaucracy and military personnel. Feeding the thousands of newcomers taxed the capabilities of the local inns, so a new style of food vendor was born: The sushi vendor would have a small stall, where he would be preparing nigiri sushi (hand sushi) as fast as he could to hand them to crowded groups of soldiers and bureaucrats, who would take the small rectangles of rice and fish with their bare hands. There was no question of napkins at the time, so the vendor would hang a rag between two poles for the customers to have a place to wipe their fingers before going back to work. The dirtier the rag, the better the sushi offerings and popularity of the street stall was.
Fast forward to the modern age, and you find that eateries still hang a piece of cloth between two poles at the exit/entrance of their establishments. Not much to guide me, but I had seen those hanging clothes in front of a few doors, so I decided to try the theory and boldly walked in at a place that had a rag with particularly prominent greasy fingerprints on it. Success! I found a nice little eatery, where for 1,000 yen I had a nice dish of fried pasta with a few slices of beef and a fried egg, accompanied by a small bowl of salad and the ever present bowl of miso soup. Maybe I will survive my remaining days in Japan!
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