Japan 2023 Day 11: Kokura

Woke up to see Nakama Yukie and her plastic face winning best mother award on tv. This is why awards in Japan don't mean anything. How can anyone accept this 'award' with a straight face?

Kokura is just north of Fukuoka and when I mention Kokura, Japanese all say its where the yakuza are.

My main reason for Kokura is that there is a manga museum and and I wanted to be able to get back to Fukuoka quickly for dinner.

Kokura station. 

NHK building with Domo-kun. 

Road to Kokura castle. 

Kokura castle. 

Gardens next to the castle.

Entrance to castle with one guy cosplaying if you want to take a picture with him.

Statue of Kojiro vs Miyamoto outside of castle.

Miniatures in the castle. I really like the depiction of how life would be like back in the day.

Another miniature.

Old samurai armour.

Drawing of tiger from back in the day. Very different from your typical ancient Japanese art.

Kokura castle is the 6th highest castle in Japan with Osakajo being number 1. I have been no Nagoya but never to Nagoya castle. 

Musashi jumping up to what Kojiro.

I think this is Kokura Tanga market. Lot of cheap food including sushi.

Bought two kani cream croquete.

The manga museum is at this place called Aruaru City.

WTF, this place has a Surugaya, Mandarake, Gee! store, Rashinban, MelonBooks, Gamers and maidreaming? Have I gone to heaven? Kagoshima was a bit disappointing in terms of gaming/subculture so this is amazing! I guess Kokura is really the second biggest city in Kyushu.

Cafe with Kimetsu no Yaiba exhibits.

More Kimatesu no Yaiba which I have tried twice to get into.

Don't think I can afford Lunar on GBA.

Entrance to manga museum. No photography allowed. It is a shrine to Matsumoto Leiji and has a manga library at the end. You can pay a cheap fee to have access to the library for the whole year. The manga library is the type of manga room I would want if I won the lottery. They had a row of the most influential manga from olden days to today and it was missing Berserk which I am not happy about.

Captain Harlock. I tried to rewatch it but couldn't get into it. I watched the butchered American version when I was a child where they combined it with another anime. Should give it another go one day.

Went to self proclaimed tabelog no 1 tonkotsu ramen Gyorantei. Tabelog is a good site to look for place to eat in Japan because the ratings are strict and anything above 3.5 stars should be pretty good.

Underwhelming.

Next stop was Mojiko, the other tourist destination in Kokura.

Its just a waterfront with old western buildings and some shops.

I think I am over waterfronts and old western buildings.

Feels like Kobe Harbourland. Meh. Could not wait to get back.

My shopping for the day. Decided to head back to Fukuoka to meet up with Ricco for dinner. I don't think there are any readers left from 11 years ago. Ricco is not my first Japanese friend, but she is my first Japanese language exchange friend and really helped me with my Japanese back when I could not make sentences and introduced me to other Japanese friends.

I have stayed at her place twice and she has taken time to show me around it has been 8 years since I saw her but we have kept in touch. I sent her a message on LINE in the morning to confirm all is good good but the message was unread all day and I was thinking something was wrong. 

6.30pm I get an email from her asking if I can see her email and that her LINE was not working! I was surprised she had my email but I think we did not use LINE back in the day, only SMS and emails. LINE on her iphone was really stuffed and had an install error when she tried to open it. If she did not have my email I don't know what would have happened. I might have found her phone number in my google contacts and called her.

Ricco couldn't get us yakiniku on Friday night so we lined up at Teppan Gyoza Tetsunabe for about 20 minutes. Convinced her to delete and reinstall LINE and luckily everything come back ok.

So much to catch up on. Ordered beer and tebasaki.

Since it was pretty late they said it was last order ie we could not make additional orders. We were panicking because we were not sure how much gyoza to order and decided to order 8 people's worth of gyoza since we were very hungry. 8 people come out to be two plates of the gyoza pictured above so once plate each. I just managed to finished my plate of gyoza and the rice did not help and Ricco had a few left over. We should have gone with 5-6 people's worth and ordered more variety. Oh well, live and learn. We had more drinks afterwards but it was great to catch up after 8 years!