Nagoya —> Kobe
There’s a Chinatown in Kobe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First shinkansen of the trip. I went from Nagoya to Kobe, a distance of some 200km, in an hour and 20 minutes. It feels insane to be travelling on the ground that fast. The average speed for a shinkansen?
500km/h. 280km/h. (Oops.)
About twice a year I go to McDonald’s and order some presumably life-saving chunk of calories. I am always drunk when I do this. Today, stone-sober and at 10am in the morning, I went to a McDonald’s in Nagoya Station and ordered a hashbrown (unequivocally McDonald’s greatest food stuff) and a sausage McMuffin with egg. I don’t know either, that’s what it was called.
I took my paper-bagged package with the intention of eating it on the platform while I waited for my train, set to arrive 20 minutes hence. But when I got to the platform I saw that exactly zero people were engaged in any activity you’d call eating except those carefully perched at dedicated food purveyor eating spots.
And so I was flummoxed. Were people not eating because they knew one shouldn’t eat on a train platform, or were they not eating because a) they had already eaten or b) it had never occurred to them to eat.
I set myself next to the rubbish bins, four equally-sized receptacles advertising their intended use with bulbous, thickly-lined illustrations of a newspaper or apple core. One bin simply said, “Other”. I stood there as if to announce my commitment to immediately, and with extreme prejudice, render the waste from my meal consumption a complete non-issue.
But even there I felt exposed. It’s hard to be the only one doing something, even something as undeniably good as tucking into a delicious McDonald’s hashbrown. And here I saw how powerful quiet social pressure can be. Without saying a word, the train station had communicated its desires to me.
Once safely onboard I pulled down the tray and arranged my illicit feast. So great was my now psychologically unstable desire for this food that I barely registered the tiny lady in the seat next to me, tucked around her rolling luggage like a delicate caterpillar. She was reading a book and as I took out the paper bag I imagined I saw her, ever so slightly, flinch.
But I didn’t care. I needed to eat this sausage McMuffin with egg and hashbrown combo like I’d never eaten anything before in my life.
And you know what? It was GREAT.
Before realizing I was in a Chinatown I had no idea how much I’d missed Chinatowns. More specifically, how much I’d missed an abundance of Chinese food. Moving from Vancouver (basically a city-sized Chinatown) to London (a well-appointed if somewhat literal Chinatown) to Amsterdam was like stepping out of a shinkansen into a taxi and finally a bicycle with no seat and a square wheel.
And suddenly I was hit with an intense feeling of being home. Not home where I live, or home where I was born, or home where my family now all resides. Home in an “ah this is a key part of who I am” home. This was likely enhanced by being deranged after almost two weeks living out of hotels. What is home? What is Thom?
In this milieu I experienced deep optional paralysis. Everything looked delicious and existentially stabilizing. And then I saw them. Soup dumplings. Xiaolongbao. God’s own moist meat parcels. Maybe the world’s most perfect food.
Honey, I’m coming home.
Average speed of a shinkansen is about 280KM/H, not 500.
The Tohoku Shinkansen is the fastest, at about 320KM/H.
You may be thinking of the linear motor train (i.e. maglev) being built for the Tokyo - Nagoya route.
McD breakfasts in Japan are really good. Also their McFlurrys and a few other things. I avoid their meals generally, since their burgers are inferior to Mos Burger.
A happy accident of serendipity to read your delightful piece. I had a McDonald's burger once. It cost 35 cents in 1965, and it was awful. I did steal fries from my children's Happy Meals over the years, but those days are long gone. Cheers.