Daylight And The Sun.

The art of otsukaresama.

By Johnny Nghiem

November 6^th, 2016

“Otsukaresama (お疲れ様) means you’re tired and it’s not used to point out someone’s lack of pep, but to thank them for exhausting their energies to do something you, or the team you’re part of, benefitted from.”

With our body quickly failing due to overeating and out of shape but really hungover all the time, we made our final push on our final hour in Takamatsu to check out the Ritsurin Garden. Why? After eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Tokyo (蔦 | Tsuta), one has to wonder what a Michelin-starred park looked like.

Ritsurin Garden has been around since 1625 and with various foot bridges, ponds, and the most beautiful vegetation ever, it was well worth the 7:00AM trot to get there.

Below is our friend Liam who we’ve run into randomly in Japan two years in a row now. Last year he took me to a Japanese trap show and this year we took him for his first bowl of udon noodles, the Ritsurin Garden, and sent him to Grandfather’s and King’s Yawd.

On our way to Osaka, we decided to go off the radar for a few hours to check out Okayama. Initially we wanted to go on the Skycycle but then Fraser remembered about Kurashiki - which is like the cleaner and drug free (probably not) version of Amsterdam and only one canal.

There’s something about general politeness and respect in Japan that I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world. Everyone walks on just one side, people wait for you to exit the subway before entering, and they love to say thank you. It’s encouraging to me to see that this exists naturally unlike places like Dubai where it can only really be found in the service industry and sounds ridiculously forced.

Below is the Bikan historical quarter in Kurashiki which is a city in the Okayama Prefecture which I wrongly compared to Amsterdam above. Besides a tree lined canal where you can take a boat tour, 19th century warehouses line up the canal which contains shops, restaurants, and bars. However, like most of Japan, as soon as you go down on alleyway you run into a whole other world of visual stimulation.

To be continued.