Summer holidays this year were a quick trip to Japan to show off the newest member of the family. The flight over was as trying as I'd feared - absolutely impossible to watch a movie or sleep when there's a crying child nearby, and especially when that crying child is yours. Air France didn't help though - rubbish service to go along with their rubbish food. The cold indifference of airport security staff was worse than all of them though. In Japan, despite being the so-called "rainy season" it was actually an even 35 degrees the entire time and really humid. The kind of weather where you just sit on the ground staring into space, sweating. It was too hot to do anything much other than loiter in convenience stores, abusing their air conditioning and looking for new exciting Pepsi flavours or Happoshu brands. I did get to have a look at the now tallest skyscraper in Japan (not including the sky tree) and had a quick trip to a Kyoto shrine, thankfully cool under the maple leaves).

For most of 2012 I was commuting to work into Waterloo station, apparently the busiest station in London (and busy enough during rush hour, making that the busiest station in the UK. And that should be pretty busy, given how packed the train and tube network are. So it was pretty revealing to see that there was no UK station in this list of top 51 busiest train stations in the world. As an example, somewhere I'm more than familiar with, Osaka Umeda, gets an annual 820,000,000 passengers per year and it's 4th on the list. First of all, holy crap that's a huge number of people. But compare that with the comparatively puny 82,000,000 per year in Waterloo (according to the Transport for London website). Even my old commuting spot of Sannomiya in Kobe (a city less that a quarter of the size of London) is high on the list at 16 with 240,000,000. It really goes to show how the Japanese train network is on a whole other level to that of practically anywhere in Europe. The highest ranking station in Europe is Paris Gare-du-Nord at 190,000,000. And all but six of the stations on the list are in Japan - number one is Shinjuku, Tokyo with a whopping 1.2 billion passengers a year. Link via Digg.com Update: So there was a further post here with a full list of the busiest 100 stations and Waterloo makes it in at 91. 91!

While we were in Japan before Christmas we took the chance to buy a couple of slightly higher quality items (well at least more than 100yen) that usually we don't have the chance to buy. In a narrow old shopping arcade near Namba, Doguya-suji, full of shops selling restaurant and kitchen equipment, we bought a traditional Santoku hōchō (3 uses) knife made in Sakai city. This city (now swallowed up by Osaka proper) was famous for samurai swords back in the day (that day being 500 years ago) and famous now for kitchen knives more than anything else. Anyway, a local knife here would be better than any heavy and expensive block of knives from elsewhere. And really, why do you need lots of kitchen knives when one sharp one will do the trick. It's really light and super sharp (though I haven't tried dropping a hair onto it to see if it splits in two) and I've accidentally cut up sponges just by trying to wash it. Unfortunately even after little usage now it's covered in stains thanks to the British hard water.

On our last day in Tokyo we went we went looking for a particular Izakaya that I'd seen recommended. It was a perfect lesson in the strange way Japanese addresses are constructed. We only had the address which I'd quickly jotted down in very bad Japanese and we didn't have a chance to find a map on the internet in the hotel thanks to its expense. Wikipedia gives a fuller explanation but suffice it to say that it's more or less described using smaller and smaller boxes, starting from the Prefecture name down. Street names are rarely used and you're lucky if you have a building number. We had a small Shibuya area tourist map and the address, trying to use landmarks like department stores and train stations to find our way. It was freezing cold and after about 20 minutes we were ready to completely give up when we amazingly stumbled upon the basement entrance down one of a million side streets, under a million neon signs, all with guys outside holding menus. The place was pretty cool, even though most of the staff looked like they were young enough to still be in school. And they even gave us a free souvenir when we left. The next day we got the Shinkansen to Osaka and were to pass by Mt. Fuji during a clear winter afternoon. We got a great view from the train. Osaka was almost how I remembered it - except a whole load of buildings had been torn down and rebuilt, perhaps twice.