A little time in Kyushu

Earlier this month, Ashley and I and the kids packed our bags and headed back to what has essentially become our second home – Japan. Since Hong Kong officially opened up after the pandemic in late 2022, Miles and I have been there seven times, while Ashley and Olive have been five times. In this we are no different from many of our fellow Hong Kongers, who have flocked to the country both out of a deep appreciation and interest in everything Japan, as well as a very cheap yen.

To be fair, the decision to go to Japan this time was not entirely up to us. After spending our last two summers in Canada to see my side of the family, the family wanted to come to Asia this summer, and Japan more specifically. We settled on Fukuoka, mainly to avoid the summer tourist crowds of Tokyo and Osaka, and because none of us had ever been before. So at the end of June, my parents and my sister and her family flew in to Osaka from Vancouver and took the shinkansen across the country to Kyushu, while our family took a quick flight up from Hong Kong to join them a few days later.

I wouldn’t say we did Fukuoka properly, whatever that means. There are plenty of kid-friendly attractions and parks throughout the city to be sure – we just didn’t do any of them. We did do a lot of walking around, exploring shrines and neighbourhoods, and old castle grounds. We attended a baseball game, which was the only planned activity we had in the city, we spent most of a day at the Canal City Hakata mall, and then we just hung out together back at our AirBnB.

The biggest difference was probably the ease of getting around and finding places to sit and eat together as a group of nine. We’ve traveled as part of larger groups of friends and family to Tokyo, and while the service and hospitality were great, we almost always had to split up for meals. In Fukuoka the tourism crowds were just not on the same scale, and that was a big positive for us. There wasn’t as much of a mad rush vibe that is admittedly part of the appeal of the Japanese megametropolises, leaving more room for observation, reflection, and day-to-day interactions.

Take me out to the ballgame!

Planning for this trip meant liaising between two very busy families (plus our retired parents) on opposite ends of the Pacific Ocean and separated by a 15-hour time difference. Other than confirming logistics for a side trip to Yufuin, the only other concrete thing on the agenda was attending a baseball game – an absolute must for those of us who grew up with the romance of baseball.

The hometown team, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, have been one of the most dominant teams in Japanese baseball in recent years, winning seven Japan Series in the 2010s, including four straight to close out the decade. They also lost in the final last year after a dominating regular season that saw them coast to the Pacific League title by 13.5 games. Overall they’ve won 11 Japan Series, the third-most after the legendary Yomiuri Giants and the Saitama Seibu Lions. They’ve won the second-most Pacific League titles at 20, also trailing the Lions. The game that night was against their rivals for the current Pacific League title this season, the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

Getting tickets to the game was super easy, especially compared to the convoluted process in getting our Hiroshima Toyo Carp tickets a couple months ago. Not to give it any free marketing, but tickets are easily purchased online on the Klook app, and it was a simple matter of showing the QR codes at the designated ticket office at the stadium when we arrived. The game experience was great and food options were in great supply – actually I missed a homerun because I was too busy deciding which food stand I was going to order from for dinner. There were the usual bombastic cheering sections and the music highlighting the action on the field, all of which delighted my family accustomed to the more staid baseball environments back home.

It was also quite nice to share these baseball moments with my family. All of my most formative memories around baseball and the Toronto Blue Jays were made with them – my very first baseball game with my dad during the ALCS in 1991 against the Minnesota Twins, the back-to-back World Series championships that riveted my immigrant parents despite their complete foreignness to the sport, the dozens of summer weekends and evenings throughout the 1990s spent with my family at the SkyDome, and the inevitable post-game naps riding the TTC subway all the way back uptown. I’m a huge fan of the Maple Leafs and the Raptors as well no doubt, being our representative hockey and basketball hometown teams, but Leafs games weren’t cheap and the Raptors fandom came of age later. If core memories are all from our childhood, then those lazy afternoons at the Dome are a big part of mine.

City of Yatai Stalls

One big perk of traveling and staying together with family is the opportunity leave the kids at home with the grandparents at night to go out on our own, something we had not done since 2017, the last time we went to Japan before starting our family. Even when we went to Tokyo with Ashley’s side of the family last December, we had all stayed in separate rooms at different hotels. As such, I had been looking forward to doing one thing at night in Fukuoka with Ashley for months – go and eat something at the city’s famous yatai stalls.

There’s a bunch of places where such open-air food stalls can be found, and we went to the ones congregated along the southern tip of Nakasu Island. My sister and brother-in-law had passed by a few nights before and reported back that it was absolutely packed, but I figured even if it was too crowded to get a seat I still wanted to see it with my own eyes. Happily for us, the crowds were very manageable, even on a Friday evening. There was enough to give the place a good buzz, but not to the extent that we felt intimidated and discouraged from even trying to squeeze in for a meal. We ended up choosing a stall that sold Fukuoka’s classic Hakata-style ramen, which we greatly enjoyed despite the summer heat. All in all, food and vibes were worth it.

Japan, finally

Our time in Fukuoka was split into two as we spent a couple days in the city at the start of our family holiday, and then a few days there to finish off our week there. In between we drove out to the hot spring town of Yufuin to relax for a few days, which I’ll get to some time later. In a way this was a bit of a make-up trip for us after our previous attempt at a family trip with my parents and my sister’s family to Japan back in March 2020 was dashed due to the onset of the Covid pandemic. In the intervening years a lot has changed – Olive was born, making us a family of four; my sister and her husband started their own family; and my parents sold our childhood home in Toronto and moved to Vancouver. The Chans that finally did make it out to Japan over five years later are a much different group, and the holiday was a much different holiday, but I’m so glad and grateful that we did make it in the end.