Balloon Shapes By Cops » Nishinomiya

Ebisu Festival, Nishinomiya and the Big Tuna

Silentjim — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:10:20 +0000

Every year, around January 10th there’s a festival held at the Ebisu branches of shinto shrines throughout Japan (well at least I think it’s throughout I’ve only ever been to the local one in Nishinomiya).

This is a 3 day festival where thousands and thousands of people queue up at the shrine to give money and pray, and also to buy, not sure what you call them, blessed “charms”? – essentially sticks with leaves on tied up with coloured ribbons and stuff (just googled it – “talismans”, or translated from the Japanese fukusasa -
lucky bamboo grass) that are blessed by the priests and bring good luck to businesses in the coming year (as seems to be traditional with these kinds of charms talismans, you bring back the previous years one and chuckit in a big pile before queuing up for the new one).

This festival is great fun and we go every year. One of the key attractions is a big tuna donated by local businesses which people queue up to stick ￥5 coins to, again, supposed to bring good luck I think.

Big Tuna

Another big attraction is the thousands of food stalls that line the streets and back streets leading up to the shrine. Never seen so much food! Every year we tuck into turkish kebabs, yakitori (chicken on sticks), karage (deep fried chicken – pronunced with a hard ‘g’) and sake from a wooden square cup.

This year I also tried squid on a stick – which I’ve been seeing around for years but never had the courage to try…pretty tasty!

Squid on a stick

For some reason aswell, this year nearly all the food stalls were rolling their food in fried eggs – pork on a stick wrapped in egg, chicken on a stick wrapped in egg, fried noodles wrapped. Must be the new trend.
For those that don’t know, Kansai is quite famous, food wise for takoyaki – which are balls of dough with octopus in, covered in mayonnaise and a brown sauce. Delicious. But of course there’s always the problem that octopusi (? – octopuses?) are quite large so you have to cut them up into small pieces, but how big should those pieces be??

Here’s a solution…

Takoyaki

Just use tiny octopusi and stick the whole thing in! (ok, sometimes one of the legs will poke through the ball, but hey, nothing in life is perfect)

© Silentjim for Balloon Shapes By Cops, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ebisu, Japanese Food and Drink, Matsuri, Takoyaki, Yakitori

A Very Pleasant Friday

Silentjim — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 05:57:19 +0000

A very pleasant Friday was had the other week.
In the morning we had a tour of Asahi Brewery in Nishinomiya (about 20 minutes away), which culminated in free beer!

Free Asahi Beer

Easy Does It

It started with a 30minute video presentation of the brewing process and Asahi brand (Asahi Super Dry is 20 years old this year), during which most of the old men who’d come here only for the free beer chatted.

Then we had a tour round the factory although no cameras we’re allowed so no photos of inside

The best bit was the crazy big robot machine in the canning and bottling section, so fast and so complicated.
Also discovered the cans are made from 2 parts, the top (lid part) and the bottom (where the drink is). They are folded together in a split second by a cool machine.
Then we were led into the bar area and given 20odd minutes to drink free beer! Aki doesn’t like beer much, so I drank hers for her. Managed to get 5 in, just in time.

Left slightly tipsy clutching souvenirs; a couple of free glasses, a phone strap with a beer can on, a beer towel and an old beer jug. Stopped myself buying the t-shirt, hat and beer cake!

Outside we saw the Asahi Brewery shrine! There’s a shrine for everything here.

Asahi Brewery Shrine

Then we went off to the highschool baseball at Koshien! Twice a year there’s a big highschool competition,which amongst many people is much more popular than the usual league.

It was the first day today and very crowded.
Aki was being very nice to me, and let me sit next to the cheerleaders (who were girls this time – see last year for the male cheerleaders).

Highschool Baseball at Koshien

It was a good game, and quite exciting (believe it or not!)
We also managed so see this interesting character

Schoolgirlman

Apologies for the poor quality of the picture.
He was a middle aged man dressed as a school girl, sitting amongst the other girls, and very, very popular.
I wasn’t the only one taking photos!

It is are not raining here also

Silentjim — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 03:42:44 +0000

Last Wednesday was our 2 and a half year anniversary so we went to our favourite sushi restaurant in Nishinomiya. It’s pretty expensive so we only go about twice a year. Fantastic sushi!

This time I wrote down what we had so I could remember it for next time:

Campachi – a white fish
Shimaaji – also a white fish
Maguro – Tuna – the best tuna I’ve had
Salmon Aburi – Salmon slightly grilled – really good
Iwashi – Sardine – pretty good
Mushiana – fresh water eel, warmed and with sauce, nice
Daiten Maki – this is the house special, and really good
Tekka Maki – Tuna rolls with strangely stinging nettles in (at least that’s what they look and taste like)
Hirame – plaice, ok, but v. chewy
Salmon aburanai – not grilled, raw salmon, great!

Finished with some Reishu or cold sake.

Sushi restaurants have their own language aswell, which I was trying to learn.
Green tea is usually Ocha, but in a sushi restaurant it’s Agari
Rice is Gohan usually, here it’s Shari
Egg is Tamago, but here, Gyoku

Mind you, I’ll never remember them.

Afterwards we found an Irish bar, The Wexford and stayed there for the night. Not a big fan of Gaijin bars, but this one was very nice, quite relaxed and served Magners cider!

There were a few Japanese customers, and we overheard this great conversation with the barman.

A couple came in, obviously locals as he was wearing an Irish shirt, think he’d bought it on St Patricks Day.

Barman: Hi How Are you?
Man : I’m fine.
Barman : You took some photos the other day? Any good?
Man : I’m fine.
Barman : No, the photos, camera, good photos?
Man : Guiness please.
Barman : Ok.

Comedy magic.

Mind you, to be fair to the Japanese guy, the number of times I’ve had similar conversations in Japanese is countless.

Them : What’s your name?
Me : from England.
In a restaurant:
Waitress : Would you like a drink to start?
Me : Jim

(they keep our own chopsticks there and we usually have to tell them our name to get them) etc. etc.

New Years in Japan

Silentjim — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 06:33:52 +0000

New Years in Japan is the big holiday of the year (even Nova closes for a week!). It’s a time when people go back to their hometowns, visit their families, drink and eat lots (lots of special kinds of food too), and probably go to the shrine at midnight New Years Eve or during New Years Day.
It’s much bigger than Christmas here (or Kurismasu), mainly as this is not a christian country, but essentially a Shinto or Buddhist one (hence the shrine).
Christmas is for lovers, New Years is for family.

Any road up, we spent the time off relaxing, drinking sake and eating lots of food. Which was v. nice. On New Years Eve we watched the big music show (a 4 hour extravaganza of all the best music of the year, and kind of a girls vs. boys competition – boys nearly always win, as they did this year), then about midnight we walked up to the Ashiya shrine (a little way up the mountain) and queued up with a couple of hundred people to pray.

Good fun.

Also, in the next “city” to us (City sounds huge, and potentially far away, however it’s about 3 stops on the local train or 5 minutes on the express), Nishinomiya, they had a big Ebisu shrine festival (this is mainly for getting good luck in businesses apparently), and was essentially an excuse for hundreds (literally!) of food stalls to be set up in the streets around the shrine, selling takoyaki, yakitori, okonomiyaki, indian food or kebabs.
Again, good fun.

Each year people buy “charms” for good luck, or safe year, etc. from the shrine, and then, by a genius of marketing, the charms run out after a year and you have to return the old ones and buy new ones!

They also have a big old Tuna here that people put coins on to bring good luck for the coming year.

Now, it didn’t smell, so possibly a fake, but I’m sure back in the day it was real. Couldn’t get close to find out, as it was pretty popular.

As you walk into the entrance of the shrine, some nice priests “purify” you (I guess that’s what they’re doing) with some white paper brushes. They looked soooo bored!

There were several things I liked about this whole religious celebration thing,

a) the free sake – well cost about 10Yen, but that’s pretty cheap for a saucer of sake

b) the fair ground atmosphere, including a ghost maze, and cork gun stalls where you could win Wii’s, PS3′s and cheap worthless cards.

c) the hundreds and hundreds of food stalls as far as the eye can see

d) the shinto followers dressed in the traditional clothes walking incredibly slowly down the middle of the street to the shrine

If only other religions could have such interesting and fun celebrations.