Yuka and I had been talking about going to Kurashiki since we had been to Hiroshima, over a year before. The town where she grew up, it lies just over the bridge next to Okayama. Many years ago it was the central rice store for Japan, and the traditional architecture has been preserved and attracts phenomenal amounts of tourist, especially during Obon!
The historical quarter is centred around Kurashiki Gawa (river) which was used for transportation of the rice. Now the area is littered with restaurants and arts and crafts shop. We found a shop devoted entirely to pickles, which have become one of my favourite Japanese foods, and another with a zillion different types of beans.
I bought some souvenirs for my family and soon to be new boss, but not giving any hints away here. Yuka wanted to buy some murasuzume for her mum, and managed to find a shop where they teach you how to make it. Murasuzume is one of Kurashiki's speciality sweets, sweet bean paste folded inside a pancake style mixture.
The final product looks like a less plastic version of this:
All this food was making us hungry and we were already exhausted from the heat so we found the busiest place in Kurashiki to have lunch. They made a version of udon, local to the region, that is thicker than the Sanuki variety, and although I was really dubious about eating udon outside Kagawa, it was actually really good.
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I rocked up to my last ever karate training early for once and on the verge of tears. However I wasn't given much time to be sentimental as we skipped normal warmups and went straight into hard core combination practice up and down the dojo, the sweat streaming off everyone before we had even started. The dojo was helping by doing a good impression of a wet steam room.
Then I realised the reason for my new gloves. As a goodbye ritual I had to fight everyone in the dojo, from the youngest little kid to Kunikata Sensei himself. Thank the Dojo Kami it was Obon and people were remarkably scarce. It started off really fun, messing around with the little kids. But the heat was killer and before I had finished off three of them the heat had me, my dogi was drenched and my face was so red it was almost green.
About half way through the ordeal it did go green for a while, see if you can spot the photo, and I had to go outside and get some fresh air to avoid throwing up. Then Irikura Sensei aimed a well executed kick at my head, I didn't get my defences up in time, somehow he didn't pull it back and I went crashing to the floor with a ring of birds circling my brain that had ended up on the other side of the room.
I ended up fighting 15 people on one of the hottest nights of the year. I kept joking that was the same test I would have to do to get my ni kyu, my brown belt which is the last before a black belt, known in Japan as shodan. However, whilst everyone laughed and appreciated my humour and my effort, no new obi was forthcoming. Instead they tried to make me promise to come back and get it.
Kunikata was taking photos all night and at the end of the evening burnt them all onto a CD for me. It was really really hard to leave and for the first time I cried. I was catching the shinkansen up to Okazaki the next day and my last night was unbelievably cool and sad at the same time.
Thank you so much everyone.
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