Sake

Today was another national holiday, this time commemorating the 1964 Olympic games which were held in Japan. For me, this meant a trip to the Gekkeikan sake factory in Fushimi, a short ride on the express train from the center of Kyoto. Because of the quality of the water, sake has been made in Fushimi for over 300 years, and the tools that were used for a certain amount of that history were on display, along with old sake bottles, advertisements, and beautiful sake sets. My favourites were most certainly the sake bottle made for easy drinking on the new Japan Railways system around 1910 (which had a cup that could be attached to the top of the bottle so that it swiveled with the movement of the train, making it less likely to spill) and the special signboard made to commemorate Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan (featuring a cartoon boy swinging a sake bottle like a bat). With the price of admission, you get your own small bottle of Gekkeikan sake (enough for a family of four to each have a small glass) and a sake tasting at the end. After this, we wandered around Fushimi a bit until we ran into the Teradaya Inn. This was the site of a famous incident involving the revolutionary Ryoma Sakamoto at the end of the Edo era. It was only as I was leaving that I realized that I’d just been hanging out in the refuge of a major player in the anti-foreigner beginnings of the Meiji restoration. Next was lunch, which was a ‘Western food box lunch’, consisting of salad with sesame dressing, fried fish, chicken, and a small hamburger patty with tomato sauce and…miso soup, rice, and sake pickles. After dinner, we watched a popular television show called ‘Smap Smap’, which follows the antics of a very popular boy-band-that-was. The most notable parts of tonight’s show was a guest appearance by Alain Delon (sp?) an apparently very famous French actor, for whom the band made competing meals. After this, there was a series of ‘destination impersonations’, where each of them was assigned a place to go and a person to be. The easiest to explain was the unfortunate one charged to dress up as a large sea creature and go to marine world, where, at one point, he was forced to join the seal show (flapping flippers and making noises and the like), where he was rewarded with peanuts flung at his head and, later, had to be dragged bodily out of the pool because while his massive costume kept him afloat, it didn’t actually allow him to swim. The final piece, however, was the one that I had been waiting for, which was a collaboration between the band and the top stars of Takarazuka, an all-female, extremely flamboyant revue-type theatre form specific to Japan. One of my classes actually has tickets to go see Takarazuka in its birthplace in November. I really can’t wait!
-They really weren’t over-concerned about drinking age at the sake factory, since the legal age here is 20, which I just make, and I was never carded.
-They use sake to make everything from pickles to beauty products.
-There is a ridiculous amount of national holidays here.
-I have no clue how to retrieve photos taken on my cell phone for use in this post, sorry!