Day 16: Gunkanjima & Kurashiki

Battleship Island

Morning boat tour to Gunkanjima (which translates to Battleship Island because from a distance it looks like a battleship). It’s a former undersea coal mining site that has been abandoned since the 70s and now being reclaimed by nature.

Also some pretty interesting history of Japanese industrialization in the early 1900’s — Mitsubishi did a lot more than make cars.

Quick Lunch

The weather was nice all morning, but of course as soon as the boat got back we had a torrential downpour. Stopped in to a random place (かみんぐ) for another Nagasaki specialty — Toroku or Turkish Rice. No idea why it’s called that because it’s definitely not from Turkey. It consists of a fried pork cutlet (or sometimes a hamburger), rice pilaf, and spaghetti with tomato sauce. Apparently, all the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could put all these things on one plate, no one stopped to ask if they should.

Kurashiki

Having made it to the far SW end of Japan and with only 5 days to go, it was time to start heading back north.

4 hours and 3 trains got me to Kurashiki (pronounced something like Ku-ras-key), a small city near Okayama. It has a historic canal zone, which was mostly closed by the time I got there, but still very pretty to walk around.

Yakinuku at Nikumania Yoshihara

At a yakinuku restaurant, you order the raw meat and it yourself on a tabletop grill. After working through some translation issues I put my order in:

150g assorted wagyu
Green onion salt beef tongue
Aged skirt steak
100g premium beef internal organ (tripe)
Assorted kimchi

Through google translate I asked the waitress if that was enough. “Yes… [long pause] … maybe too much”.

The wagyu was like rich and buttery, and the skirt steak was very flavorful. The tripe was also surprisingly good paired with kimchi.

At the end, I tacked on a beef sushi (made from wagyu filet) and some cookies and cream ice cream, because why not.

Now, back to my hotel to soak in the onsen and work through the meat sweats.