Thursday Thoughts in Kanazawa

When the hotel toilet senses that I’m approaching, a soft blue light glows from the bowl, followed by a gentle pre-rinse. Like a prelude – or foreplay. When I’m done, it flushes automatically.

The other day, while sitting on the heated toilet seat made by the Japanese brand Toto, the song “You Are the Flower” started playing on my phone. Coincidence or cosmic comedy?

There’s a calm in Kanazawa – a port city about the size of Gothenburg – unlike anything I’ve experienced elsewhere in Japan. Except perhaps in Hiroshima, where the stillness weighed a bit too heavily, especially around the ruin that remains after Enola Gay dropped Little Boy over the city.

Can’t help but think of Gojira movies every time I hear fire trucks or ambulances here.

Sometimes we just don’t have the energy to eat out, especially after a long day when the step counter shows we’ve walked 25,000 steps. Then we opt for a hotel room picnic.

I calculated that Charlotte and I have eaten at least 9,000 meals together since we met in 1996.

With a bag full of sushi trays, containers with veggie sticks, and a couple of Asahis we’ve picked up from Family Mart, 7-Eleven, or Lawson, we’re set for dinner on one of the room’s little bedside tables. It works – and it’s actually quite cozy.

Dining at a simple izakaya along our street usually runs just over 10 USD per person. Our picnics cost about half that.

Yesterday before dinner, I filled the small bathtub and fell asleep to a gloomy prophecy about the AI bubble soon bursting – and the looming risk that the world will then plunge into a bottomless economic crisis. Oh well.

I think the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa is world-class. There was breadth, depth, and height in every exhibition I saw yesterday.

I had a hot dog for lunch yesterday at an obscure sausage stand tucked inside a little red wooden house in the samurai district. Perhaps a blasphemous act of unforgivable proportions – but I couldn’t resist. It is your destiny, Luke.

There’s a distinction between being liked and being tolerated. But even at sixty-two, I sometimes struggle to tell the difference.

Some Japanese people I meet can barely contain their enthusiasm when interacting with me. Others don’t see me at all. To them, I feel kind of invisible.

A truly fascinating social aspect of traveling in Japan is how you make an extra effort to match the level of politeness and respect that Japanese people display – regardless of what they might actually think or feel about us gaijin (外国人). It sort of brings out my best game. I like that.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the social climate in Japan reminds me of how it was in the US as a kid and how it used to be in Sweden when I moved there in the 1970s.

At the large tourist information office in the Katamachi area, along Chome Street, the staff are incredibly friendly. Those I’ve spoken with speak almost fluent English.

I can’t fathom how the politicians in Malmö can be so clueless that they fail to see the value of having a proper tourist office in Sweden’s third-largest city. Embarrassing.

I love how almost nothing is left to chance here. Everything has its place – has been designed or crafted to clarify or at least make things less ugly.

We’re staying a few doors down from St. Louise Jigger’s Bar, where time stands still. The place would have been a bit too stiff for Bukowski, but Hitchens would probably have had a hard time tearing himself away from one of the creaky barstools.

Next to St. Louise Jigger’s Bar is a gentlemen’s club with an entrance one floor down, where the doorman standing on the street looks like a character from Tony Scott’s excellent film noir Black Rain with Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia.

We have a few days left in Kanazawa before the autumn tour through the Land of the Rising Sun heads south.

If you’ve read this far, I want to thank you for trudging through my scattered thoughts and more or less interesting observations.

I’m emptying myself of impressions – to make room for new ones. Tomorrow we’re visiting a soy sauce factory.