To Julie, Fukuoka felt like a mini-Tokyo in that it glued together distinct districts with different moods, themes, and attractions. The riverside chow zone, the nature-laden suburbs, a thrifting district, the shopping area, the restaurant bloc, and so on.

To me—this, my second visit to Fukuoka, the first by myself in 2015—I could never quite get the hang of the place. I never found myself really jelling with any of the vibes—the buildings, beaches, parks, food, malls, walks, and views were good, but it just didn’t quite click with me the way other places in Japan did. I still don’t know exactly why.⁰¹

But let’s focus on the positive:

• Hakata style ramen, of extraordinary richness
• Uminokamichi Seaside Park, of extraordinary tranquility (save the dive-bombing birds)
• Fukuoka Tower, of extraordinary views
• Fukuoka Art Museum, of extraordinary synergy with our own tastes in art
• Plus, we saw a baseball game, which was awesome.

Let’s dive in.

Fukuoka, The City#

Fukuoka felt deeply water-integrated. You always felt near an aquatic feature of some kind. Geographically, it sits on Japan’s coast pointing right towards Korea. There are discount goods stores that, I think, market to international shopping tourism. And you can take a boat between the two countries. (This—boating from Fukuoka to Busan—was my plan in 2015, but bad seas caused cancellations, and my plan-only-a-day-in-advance style left me scrambling to book flights while sitting in the Fukuoka ferry terminal.)

Let’s have a look around.

Above, find: my usual obsession with shapes and lines on tall buildings, brutalist housing blocs and shape mashups, a hundred pictures from literally any tower with a view, and some favorite signs. The Super “DRY” (why the quotes???) Asahi is beautifully animated, a golden wave that fills the sign to the brim.

I don’t know if it’s due to Japan’s almost obsessive mascotification (e.g., the airport security has a mascot. I cannot make this up.), but I found myself maybe anthropomorphizing more than usual. In the pouring rain, do you too see all these bird-themed boats as ‘huddled together,’ much in the away aquatic fowl might?

Have a gorgeous time! (Translation: for the love of god, stay away.)

We stayed in a lucky find of an AirBnb, weirdly spacious for the price, a few blocks from the canals, and just a couple minutes from a great grocery store. My strongest memory is of Marcus—travel companion for Okinawa and this leg—needing a place to stay for a night, we offered he crash at ours, but then we had the A/C on so cold that he couldn’t sleep the entire night, but felt too guilty saying anything to us. (Sorry again Marcus.)

Uminokamichi Seaside Park#

A short local train ride across the bay, Uminokamichi Seaside Park was a bicycling paradise. As luck would have it, by the time we arrived, they were completely out of bicycles. We made proverbial lemonade and did our damndest to have a lovely time amongst the flowers anyway.

Having since conducted (produced? starred in? what’s the phrase here?) a wedding—writing this 2.5 years later—I’m empathetic to the desire to get great photos, but nevertheless find the sight of man repeatedly throwing veil in the wind then running out-of-shot quite amusing to watch on loop.

Some unexpected chaos that hadn’t been infrastructured away: birds constantly circling and aggressively diving for food at the food truck lunch zone. Not just scavenging, but actively stealing. It was quite funny, but also nontrivially harrowing once you got food yourself.

In the video I’m saying something like, Oh my god did it just go for that baby?!

I can’t tell if this is a cultural difference, but while traveling I’ve observed more animals in non-zoos than I think we have in the USA? (The other places I distinctly remember this were a monkey seemingly randomly in a cage in a big park in Hanoi, and the piles of other (random?) animals (bats, turtles, etc.) in Okinawa’s snake museum.) So anyway, there were some monkeys blasting around in a tiny-moated jungle gym in this park, which was cool I guess.

I’m always morbidly fascinated by how little distance it takes to keep a species permanently imprisoned.

Conveyor Belt Sushi Delights#

Let me count the ways.

One: there’s a slot for your plates.

Two: this slot triggers digital games with physical prizes (see prize balls overhead in next video) to play whenever you dump five of them in there.

Absolutely genius. Never had the foggiest what was happening with the game though.

Three: you might think, oh, what if people before me on the conveyor belt grab everything good off of it? Well, it turns out there’s an second story, express conveyor belt that shoots dishes you order (hassle free on a screen) directly to your table.

It is extremely tempting to grab other tables’ dishes as they fly by. The only disadvantage of this setup is the actual normal slow belt ends up going almost totally unused, and you do miss (a) the randomness of wondering what might be around the corner, and relatedly (b) not having to choose everything.

Four: you may think that with this setup, they could not deliver, for example, a bowl of screaming hot liquids to you at high speeds. You would be wrong.

Miso soup, in which form could probably survive being launched from a cannon.

Fifth and final: they have the combination delight and horror of an automated beer pouring machine, which commits Japan’s cardinal beer sin of dispensing pure foam on top of the beer with a separate spout to give the beer the perfect aesthetic beer look.

Beer nerds avert your eyes.

Naturally, after discovering this particular conveyor belt sushi incantation (Kura) in Fukuoka, we went constantly, in every city we could.

Botanical Garden & Zoo#

I loved the brick walkways and buildings and glass domes. It gave the park’s building zones almost an academic feel, like you were in a movie where a post-scarcity civilization cultivates interesting new varietals.

Throughout, many folks living their best life.

I can’t help but notice there’s almost a uniform like thing going on, like even the guy painting in the park has to wear a wacky guy who paints in park outfit, it’s never just an guy dressed like everyone else who happens to have an easel and acrylics.

A universal phenomenon seems to be that any gaggle of photographers sports a mind-blowing gear collection. And they love photographing birds.

Truly no idea. They at least quoted ‘Mrs. Butt’ in the Japanese.

As usual, seeing animals in what had to be too-tiny cages, exhibiting sad behaviors, triggered my wondering when our species will have a collective grappling about zoos.

It’s hard to see it as anything other than nervous pacing. Also, sun bears look weird to me because I expect bears to be chonkier. Kind of optics like a scary dog.

The long walk back from the park yielded some of the nicer Fukuoka wandering we did the whole time, in my humble opinion.

Here, I experiment more with the Moment zoom lens I had for my iPhone, which I put on the iPhon’s builtin zoom lens, and with which you need to shoot raw (no fancy auto multi-photo light balancing etc) and way under-exposed. You can tell when I’m doing this because the photos come out way too dark even after my attempts at editing.

Japanese Baseball#

We went to a baseball game. Fun but also, as usual, even more fascinating.

First, marvel at the incomprehensible lack of price gouging.

Like, these prices would be excellent even at the old 100¥ = 1$ rate, though it’s even (way) better now. What’s an ice cream at a stadium in the USA? $12 on a good day?

But even more marvelous than the prices were the rules. I mean, not the existence of them. That people actually followed them. To a T. First, the explicit ones: sit down to watch the game. Makes sense, so you don’t block or annoy people. This is probably on the books everywhere.

But what was incredible was not just that everyone did this well and orderly, but that the whole practice of cheering had been institutionalized into a specific routine. Now, I don’t know for sure, but here’s what seemed to be happening. A specific section of the stadium was assigned to be the cheering section. They had a band, cheering equipment (big inflatable bangy things), and a set collection of tunes and chants to go through.

The cheering zone at work. If you look past the section divide, people are strictly sitting and not cheering.

The rest of the stadium just watched quietly. I kid you not. There were not pockets of rowdy or excited people, as far as I could see. The rowdiness was organized and accounted for.

Oh, and they had girls walking around with kegs of beer on their back.

Of course I ordered one.

Hakata Ramen#

I think Hakata is the name of the historical, older city at the heart of what is now modern Fukuoka.

Ramen is a genre of food, much how for Americans pizza is (e.g., deep dish pie vs NY-style slice).

Hakata-style ramen is tonkotsu, which means the broth is based in boiling pork bones for a gazillion hours. I think especially here in Hakata itself, tonkotsu is made quite rich. It was incredible. My favorite style of noodle soup, bar none. Here is one picture.

Though a light meal it ain’t.

Fukuoka Art Museum#

The Fukuoka Art Museum convinced us that it isn’t the size of the museum that matters, it’s what’s in it. Specifically, how close the curator’s taste is to yourself. Because the museum is modest, but, for our tastes, just excellent.

I’m not including photos from inside, but I do present to you a Yayoi Kusama pumpkin that’s out front, and an organized and brilliant keyed umbrella holding system.

Strangely, one of my few vivid memories of Fukuoka from 2015 are the architecture, pumpkin, and umbrella stands of this art museum. The only downside of the umbrella thing is that if you have a different style (short, collapsible) it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, that’s what I have.

Foreign Stuff#

Always trivial but always fascinating are the little differences you find in stuff you’re used to.

In case you’re not familiar with Monster, this M-cubed variety is a rarity for me. Comes in a cute can. I’ve only seen it in Japan.

Seattle’s OG baseball team, played just once season in 1969. (I doubt the shirt is that old.)

For having lifted a store’s name, it actually looks quite nice inside!

Video games#

Just some bits and oddities that likely won’t interest you unless you’re a nerd as well.

In the west: ‘Galaga’

I’d only heard/experienced of the Mr. Game & Watch character in Smash. Never knew what it was. So I assume this is it??

Did you know BotW was out on the WiiU? I’d vaguely realized this, I think, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a copy. (Kind of makes sense that the in-game electronics device you use actually does look more like a WiiU than a Switch.)

My Favorite Section, The Addendum#

Try to guess what this product is from the first photo alone.

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Ready?

BIG MUSCLE

It’s an idea too good to work well: buy concentrate, dilute yourself. Choose the kind of beer-like beverage you want to consume. I knew it must be awful but, but the idea immediately locked into my brain. Fast forward to the Sapporo post to see the results when we finally tried it.

This one’s not strange, it’s just amazing. We saw a stand selling tiny doughnuts. Walked out of the building. Paused. Went right back in and bought sixteen of them.

I’m not sure which is more disturbing as a food truck mascot, a sexy pig:

… or a guy with a ski mask, knife, and eight-pack ready to come murder you:

I was ready to write a joke like, just kidding, it’s clearly the… but I am still legitimately torn as to which I like less.

There’s a law brewing here: the more specific the vice, the better the sign illustrating not to do it.

I think the Chartreuse monks had just announced they weren’t going to keep ramping up enormous production of the secret liquid, leading to a run on Chartreuse and price hikes everywhere. So it was crazy to be walking through this store (the big bulk shopping good store, targeted potentially at Korean shoppers, I’d alluded to before) and see a bottle going for USD $18.50! Though note it is a small bottle (35cl).

Not only are the bad things kind of cute, but they’re cutely sad. Are they sad because they know they are inherently bad things? This seems unlikely, c.f. the rolling cart. So is it they’re actually sad at the prospect of you brining them into this forbidden location?

Onwards#

By the end of our couple weeks here, Julie got sick, and we had to move places. Our final location for just a few days was a microscopic hotel room in a weird, unstaffed building. Around the time, I’d finished the incredible game Inscryption and was feeling inspired. So, I spent a couple days holed up in the nearly windowless hotel room, working in a fevered frenzy on the Card layout feature of my website (visible from the studio; click the top-right four-squares button inside the page).

After this, we’d go down to Kagoshima and begin the long journey up Japan’s whole main island via train. But before that, in the next post, I’d like to share about our two-day trip to Nagasaki, the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited on the whole dang earth.

Footnotes

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1. I put this in a sidenote because it’s a bit more incisive than I usually try to write: The famed canalside food stalls were overpriced, jammed with tourists, gruff, and dished mediocre food. It’s completely understandable given the volume of one-and-done visitors they serve, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. ↩︎