December 20th, 2023

Day 17

Today is the day that I go back to China! Though I wanted to stay in Japan a bit longer, it’s not my real home, after all, gotta go home some time. Still, I’ve stayed here for 16 full days, that’s longer than how most people stay here as a tourist. I’ve experienced everything, and I literally mean everything, that I could think of with the Japanese culture. I enjoyed every second here, and I thank myself for pushing myself out the doors to come to Japan by myself.

Here is my flight information.

Flight Number: 9C6988

Date: December 20th, 2023

Time: 16:55 — 18:55 (Local Time)

Price: 1101 RMB

I’ve got some time before I absolutely need to head to the airport, so during that time, I can go retrieve my pictures from Toyo, and I can get some lunch to cap off my Japan trip 2023. When I woke up in the morning, I showered like usual, and decided to just get some simple microwave breakfast from a convenience store. The only problem with that plan is that there is no convenience store near the hotel that I stayed at that day. There’s a considerable distance between my hotel and the convenience store, so on the halfway of walking there, I changed my mind and decided to get some beef rice for breakfast.

The first chain beef rice store to enter China was Yoshinoya, and it left a huge impression on me as a kid. As I first started college in America, not knowing where to get food and with the fact that there’s a Yoshinoya right across the street from campus, I ate nothing but Yoshinoya for a week until I started to explore the other restaurants. So yes, I wanted to get Yoshinoya for breakfast. The only problem with that plan, again, is that there is no Yoshinoya near by. The closest beef rice restaurant is called Matsuya, and is purportedly to be pretty good.

Matsuya has often appeared in the Yakuza games, and was only recently being replaced by Yoshinoya. So I am familiar with Matsuya’s menu, and was actually curious about the taste. That’s when I changed course and headed straight to the nearest Matsuya. Once I got there, I placed an order on the order screen, and the machine gave me two tickets. I ordered a small beef rice and a raw egg, and that came to two separate orders, hence the two tickets.

After you place an order, you just grab a seat and wait for the waiter or waitress behind the counter to confirm your order. As to why I ordered a raw egg, it seems to be how Japanese people eat it. My cousin, who used to work in Japan, always told me how raw egg with rice tastes like heaven, but it never swayed me because it sounded gross. So, today, I’ve decided to give it a shot and see if I would change my mind.

Soon, the food arrived, and I cracked an egg into the beef bowl, stirred it, and started to eat. The beef was good, the raw egg was not. The thing is, I ordered a small beef bowl, and there wasn’t much rice and beef to begin with. My cousin always orders the largest bowl, and when he adds an egg into the mix, the egg could spread evenly onto everything and wouldn’t make the rice too soggy. When it’s a small bowl, however, there’s too much raw egg attached to everything and everything went soggy. So yeah, that wasn’t the best meal ever, and I continue to believe that raw egg with rice is not the best combination in the world.

After breakfast, though, since I am not in a hurry at all today, I walked back to my hotel, waited till it was checkout time, and left my luggage at the front desk. I said that I would be back by 12:00 PM. After that, I headed straight to Toyo.

Toyo is located near a very old looking market, so there are a lot of restaurants near by. There’s one such restaurant that claimed to be Shanghai food, but from the pictures, it’s mostly Cantonese food. I grabbed this picture and sent it to my friend Jenson, who is Cantonese by the way. He wasn’t too happy with the mischaracterization of Cantonese food here.

Then, I got to Toyo, and successfully retrieved the only picture left, the signed picture from Nonoka. She didn’t write much, which wasn’t expected, because she so long to write such short message. Still, I got my picture, so I headed back to the area around my hotel.

I got back to my hotel at around 12:00 PM, but it’s still too early for me to get to the airport now. My flight leaves by 16:55 PM, and with the golden rule of getting to the airport at least three hours before the flight, including the one hour rapid train that gets me to the airport, I should only start to leave by 1 PM. That gave me one hour of free time, and yes, I am going to use that for lunch.

I walked around the street, and saw a building dedicated for different restaurants. At the entrance, there is a giant bulletin board of each restaurant’s information, and a menu of each restaurants. I browsed through all of them, and decided to get some wagyu BBQ at the top floor. When I got to the top floor, no one was at the front desk. I waited a while, and just decided to walk in. There aren’t too many “customers”, and when one of them saw me walking in, came up to me and asked me if I needed any help. I said I am one person who wants to dine here. He then told me that the restaurant only opens at night. That was awkward, so I thanked him, got down to the building entrance, and decided to get a Sukiyaki meal.

When I reached the floor of the Sukiyaki restaurant, I was guided to sit near a giant window that looks to the side of the street. After I placed my order, the waitress set a portable gas stove in front of me. Fancy.

Then, she brought me rice, miso soup, and radish side dish. I was quite hungry at that point so I ate some rice, drank some soup, and ate some radish side dish. So basically I ate a little bit of everything because I was so hungry.

Finally, the main dish came. Look at the coloring of that meat! It looked so fucking good! The waitress instructed me to add my own sugar, my own sukiyaki sauce, and my own water to the food. That was pretty new, the only other Sukiyaki I’ve had was in China, and that wasn’t as much DIY as this restaurant. The waitress also told me to wait 1 minute while the pot cooks the onion before I add all the sauces and sugar.

This is what it looked like after a while of cooking. Let me just tell you this, it tastes as good as it looks. It looks good, so it tastes good. The meat literally melts in your mouth, and that texture is just perfect in my mind. I enjoyed everything and devoured everything even though I was full, and I ended up with a giant belly full of wagyu cooked to perfection. This is the perfect end to a perfect Japan trip in 2023.

Restaurant Verdict:

★★★★★

You know what’s not a perfect end to a rather perfect trip to Japan? The airport. But I’m getting ahead of myself. After lunch, I got back to my hotel at around 1:00 PM, grabbed all my stuff from the front desk, and headed to the train station. The rapid train to the airport was uneventful, and the ticket price was the same as the trip of me getting from the airport, 970 Yen. As soon as I got to the airport, I went up to the floor for international departure, and was absolutely shocked by what I’ve seen.

It was full of people! In Chinese, we have a saying called 人山人海, if translated literally would mean something like “people mountain people sea”, or there’s too many people, it’s mountains and seas made of people. That’s precisely what that day was. I had to squeeze past many waiting lines to get to my counter, which didn’t start to do checkins yet. Turns out, they only start to do checkins two hours and thirty minutes before the flight departure, so there’s nothing I could do at that point. I just waited in line for another 30 minutes.

There were two lines, the line that I lined up at, and the line that some people who got in early lined up at. Turns out, I lined up at the correct line, and the people who got in early lined up at the wrong line when airport staff unrelated to the airline moved them to a different location. They got maaaad. It was a very interesting sight to see, Chinese people fighting each other in a Japanese airport. I can understand their frustration, but I do not understand their attitude. Either way, the airline was forced to open up another counter just for these people who got in early and was directed away by the airport staff.

I didn’t buy the business class ticket like the trip where I got to Japan, not because I didn’t want to, but because tickets were sold out. So I waited like another hour before I could reach the counter, and after checkin, I was told that because there were so many people at the airport that day, I should hurry up to line up by the security check or else I would miss my flight, as the gate would be closed.

So I started to find the line to the security check point, and it wasn’t at the security check entrance. It was at the entrance of the entire international departure checkin hall. Yes, there were so many people that day, that the line, after being folded so many times, starts all the way at the airport entrance. I’ll just say this, I spent 2 hours waiting for security check. 2 FUCKING HOURS! It was that horrible. During then, I dropped my bag containing the ceramic plates I bought for my nephew on the floor, which was when I believe I broke them.

When I finally reached the security check entrance, I realized what the problem was. Before they allow you to get frisked by security, you need to manually scan your passport and your face onto a machine. It would be fine if it was a full line of machines that worked; but no, only two machine worked for a full airport full of people. And it’s not like it’s a quick process; each person takes at least 30 seconds to pass through, and when you encounter idiots, and there were many of them, the process was a minute or more. GOD there were so many idiots, which contributed to the traffic jam. But that is not to take blame away from the airport and the way Japanese people treat situations like this. Japanese people are notoriously bad in situations like this, where they must follow the rule to the teeth and wouldn’t budge a bit to increase efficiency. It could be a good thing in certain moments, but it definitely wasn’t one when there’s so many people waiting to get to their planes and probably wouldn’t because of the terrible efficiency of the airport.

Anyways, when I successfully went pass security check, I ran downstairs to the main hall to find my boarding gate. Kansai airport is interesting, because once you pass security check and customs check, you are greeted with a duty free shop full of expensive stuff. That’s some smart thinking, because tourists, especially Chinese tourists, tend to shop a lot, and giving them the option to shop right before boarding was a good business decision. But, since all people were stuck at the security check line, the duty free shop was empty, and the people who were there are all people like me who were rushing to get to the boarding gate. Again, I must say I am completely shocked by the low efficiency of Japanese culture because of some rule following that shouldn’t be the case.

My boarding gate is a transfer train away, but before I got on the train, I bought a drink from a vending machine, because I knew that my airline for the day do not give out free water. After I bought the drink, I got on the transfer train, and reached the boarding gate before the supposed gate shut time. I felt good, because I was diligent enough to get to the boarding gate before the gate closes, but kinda felt bad for the people who didn’t get to board.

That feeling got away when I got on the plane. Spring Airlines really is one of those cheap airlines, and they squeeze every inch of leg space as possible to stuff more cheap passengers in. Since I couldn’t buy a business class ticket like I did last time, I sat at a economy seat, and I am just going to be honest with you, I couldn’t fit my knees in. If I squeeze my knees in, it would be crushed by the seat in front of me. If I spread my legs open to get more room for myself, my legs would touch the passenger on my left. What a shitty, shitty environment to stay in for the next three hours.

Except, that wasn’t three hours. It was four hours. The gate didn’t shut for another hour so they could wait for the passengers who were stuck at the security checkpoint. Since I’ve booked so many hotels through Ctrip, I was upgraded to platinum membership, and was given a free entrance into a business class lounge at the Kansai Airport. My original plan was to get through security as fast as possible and stay at the airport lounge until it’s boarding time. Now, since the chaos at security check, I ran past the lounge and didn’t think twice. With the plane stuck on tarmac for the additional hour waiting for passengers to come, I really should’ve went into the lounge and wait there, instead of being stuck at the tiny seat on the plane.

The tiny bottle that I bought from the vending machine did not even make it past takeoff, so I had to buy another bottle of water from the airplane crew. Other than that, the plane ride itself was mundane, just uncomfortable, that’s all. The plane arrived an hour late, which was obvious, and it took another 30 minutes for the bags to come out.

But before the baggage came out, I had to go past customs. Back when covid was still a thing in China, my old travel visa to China was suspended, so I had to apply for a business visa. When I arrived in China from my trip to Korea, I was stopped by Chinese customs for a good ol’ hour with another American. Now that China has reopened its boarders fully and reinstated all the previously suspended travel visa, I no longer needed to use a business visa to get into China, so I just used my travel visa. However, I forgot that it was a travel visa, and I put in “business” in the foreigner entry card at the box where it asks for my purpose of visiting China. The customs officer was confused, and she called someone in the back.

The person she called was the same person that was on my case back in 2022. I didn’t recognize him, because back then, he was in a full medical suit covering from head to toe. He recognized me, because he’s heard of our company and remembered me from that. When he named our company without me saying anything, I realized that it was him, and was quite surprised. Anyways, he told me to not write business travel while having a travel visa and let me pass. Interesting fella.

My brother in law was waiting for me outside, and once my luggage finally came out, I went outside and went to get some Chinese BBQ with my brother in law’s uncle and my cousin.

I feel bad saying this, but after 16 days in Japan, I was a bit sick of Japanese food. To have Chinese food, especially North Eastern barbecue with raw marinated seafood is just the thing I needed. In the end, I am still Chinese, and Chinese food is what I will always come to in the end. Lol.

Activity Tally