DAY 70 - Morioka, Japan

We had arranged to meet Dan's friend Iain Runcie at Tokyo airport where he would be joining us for the next three weeks while we're in Japan. He used to live here and speaks and reads some of the language which should be quite useful. He also has a number of friends in Tokyo and, after one of them picked us up from the airport and drove us to the hotel, we went out for some food with a group of locals. The restaurant was very traditional with no English spoken (or on the menus) and was the sort of place we would never get to try on our own. The flip side of this was that we had to take our shoes off on entering. This definitely affected our appreciation of the smell of the food given the extended washing cycle our clothing is operating under. Everyone was very polite though.

Japanese people are sooo polite. It makes you want to be polite back. It can be quite embarrassing at times.

Over the next couple of days we did some of the usual tourist sites in Tokyo. I've been there before but didn't mind seeing a few places again like Asakusa (temples and stalls) and Shinjuku (light pollution and mobile phone shops). I also got to go to the National Museum this time (which was shut on my previous visit). One new "experience" though was to go to a Karaoke Kan. My singing is renowned throughout England for its deep resonant quality and the expert tonal control i have, so it was an opportunity for Dan and Iain to have a private performance. You basically hire a small room (think broom cupboard) with a TV, large remote (to select your songs), a couple of microphones and lots of flashy lights. You then get one hour to scream to high-heaven and lose your voice, which we did. Great fun. I just hope the rooms were sound proof.

On Monday one of Iain's friends drove us to Nikko, about 100 miles north of Tokyo. It's another shrine complex, but a particularly big one. This was the first time I'd really got out of the cities while in Japan, and the countryside was worth the long drive.

Wednesday we took the train up to Morioka. (We've got rail passes which are only available to foreign tourists and allow you to go anywhere in Japan by train for two weeks for £230. Bargain.) It's a nice place but totally impenetrable. They clearly don't get many western tourists up here. No-one speaks English and although the restaurant names and the headings on the menus are written in English, it's impossible to work out what you're ordering as the rest is only in Japanese. I could hardly expect more: the menus in London aren't in Japanese, are they? It's funny that wherever you look, you see western influences but they usually turn out to be only skin deep. There are a couple of McDonald's, but they're the only American chain here. Almost all the other places sell exclusively Japanese style food. Fortunately most places (even posh establishments) either have pictures of the food or plastic mock-ups of their meals (!) to distinguish random-meat-product-'A' from random-meat-product-'B'.

One curious observation we've made is the random use of English on T-Shirts. People walk around - and we've seen this all over Asia - with completely meaningless statements on their chests. Clearly they don't know the meaning of what they're wearing. We saw a girl who couldn't have been a day over six years old with "I am bitch" written on her front. Weird.

Since we got here we've made good use of the rail passes and have been on local excursions to various temples and the like. Definitely suffering shrine-fatigue now though. It's difficult to maintain your interest on your one hundredth temple. There's not a lot of variation in design between one and the next.

On Friday we were going to climb the local volcano but it rained so we went to the cinema instead. Well, it would have been muddy and all that sulphur is a bitch to get out of your clothes...

Convenience stores are a laugh. There are at least two on every street, and they all sell pretty much the same stuff: rice pots, cans of coffee, grape Kit Kats, beer (in at least 7 sizes); you get the idea. The Japanese are renowned for having healthy, long lives. You wouldn't think it possible with all the crap that's sold in their shops.

Today we had another excursion to Kakunodate. It's a small town, laid out on a feudal plan with lots of old Shogun houses. It was very pretty if slightly underwhelming. Had a bit of a hangover from last night. Went to a restaurant where you could have as many drinks as you could down in 90 minutes for 1,200 Yen (£6). The beer is quite expensive here otherwise so this was a real bargain. The locals don't drink much, so we probably drank the restaurant's entire profit for the day away. Oops.

Rich.