Fukuoka slash New Year's

Fukuoka is the biggest city on Kyushu. It's a great place to go if you like getting free packets of tissues. Tissues are often used as advertising media in Japan, since some public bathrooms don't have toilet paper and it's good to always have some on you. People pass the packets out on the street, either with flyers or with mini ads tucked into the package. Sometimes you can also get free beauty samples in the same way, from workers just passing them out on the street.

Anyway, Ed and I were in Fukuoka on New Year's Day and the next few days after that. On New Year's Day in Japan, it seems like people are still hanging around at home, eating traditional foods. Most of them are dried or pickled, dating back to when people didn't have refrigerators and most stores closed on the day. They also eat things like sushi and sashimi, and mochi, that awful rice dough I got to pound with a mallet in Kumamoto. Glob, I hate Japanese food. Anyway, people are all about the firsts of the year--first trip to a temple or shrine, seeing the first sunrise of the year, first tea ceremony, and especially first shopping sale. I don't think the stores were open on the first, but on the second, it was frigging crazy.

We were walking by one of the big shopping centers, Tenjin Core, looking for some lunch or something, and there were so many people on the sidewalk that we accidentally got herded into the building. Here's a video of what happened. Notice the signs that force you to go one way, the packed escalators, and all the security dudes with megaphones.

Here's a shot of the sidewalk once we escaped through a different door. The cones are there to make a special line to get into the store at the front of the building. The place is so packed in the main corridors that you wouldn't be able to get to the door of this particular shop, so they made it its own entrance. Jeez.

Here's a shot of the exit-only that we took. You can see the jammed crowd inside.

When I first visited Fukuoka in 2009, I was only there for three nights, and there was a music festival happening all over the city. Consequently, Fukuoka seemed like a pretty cool place. I didn't realize that it's actually not all that cool to visit when there's no festival going on. It's mostly just full of giant shopping centers, which are filled with expensive stuff. It also has a good nightlife, it seems, with tons of bars and clubs, but almost all of them have a pretty high cover charge for absolutely no reason (i.e. there's no band or DJ there to justify charging customers to hear). There are a number of museums in Fukuoka, and we did manage to get to the Asian Art Museum after it reopened on the 4th, but other than that, they were all closed when we were there. So we spent most of the time just walking around, looking at stuff.

Here's a picture of Ed disrespecting a temple.

We saw Fukuoka Tower, but didn't go up there.

The tower has a special photo selfie spot, where you can put your camera on this little shelf and set it to take your picture, with the tower conveniently centered for you.

Here's the tower from afar. Nice view.

The reason we were by Fukuoka Tower was because Ed had read about this place called Robosquare, which has a bunch of robots that you can interact with and see demos of and stuff. This being Japan, we thought that would be pretty amazing. It was not, however. I had this image of an outdoor square, with like life-size robots doing stuff, and little robots wandering around doing stuff, and all that kind of thing. But in reality, it was just a room with a bunch of crappy small robots. At the entrance, there's a Hello Kitty robot that can respond to some simple commands like "What time is it?" (in Japanese), but it didn't move or do anything else. Siri is waaaay more advanced. Some of the other robots were just animals that moved a little and were soft, so people in nursing homes, hospitals, etc. could have something soft to touch and talk to without the risk and maintenance of a real animal. Basically, the most advanced robot in there was about that the level of a Furby. So if you're planning a trip to Fukuoka, I suggest you skip Robosquare.

Blah blah blah...


Easily the best thing we did in Fukuoka before Ed went back home was to visit a cat cafe. But that's a helluva lot of photos and videos, so I'll do that one next time.