Hamamatsu

Thursday 28th March, 2024

We left Tokyo on the mighty Shinkansen.  (Trick question: why don’t they warn to Mind The Step when getting off and on the train? Answer: because there isn’t one!)

Catherine’s university friend, Mingo, met us with her 2 children, Yuuki and Ria, and we went straight for a lunch of the local speciality – eel, served on rice with a sticky slightly sweet sauce, plus miso soup, and crunchy Japanese pickled radish and cucumber. No chairs at the low table, so we sat on our knees…

 

Hamamatsu is the headquarters of Yamaha and Mingo had booked a visit to the company’s Innovation Road which showcases their products, now all connected to music.  It’s not every day that you get to play on a concert grand piano that Sviatoslav Richter once recorded on. We reached it on a decidedly old-school train that runs up and down a single line from the centre. Interestingly, although like all Japanese trains, it’s run by a private company, it has not integrated its the ticketing into the national network, so our digital travel passes wouldn’t work and we actually had to buy paper tickets!

Inside, the Yamaha site they encourage you to try out the instruments, so at times there were, for example, 5 grand pianos being played at the same time, including one by a young (8 years old?) budding Rachmaninoff – all very Charles Ives. Satch tried out some guitars, and the drum set in a sound booth was a hit (!), too. There was a fascinating performance of a jazz trio playing virtually, that is with with exact playback of the original instruments (piano keys going up and down, bass strings vibrating, drums sounding exactly as when recorded) and the musicians were holographs filmed at the time of recording.  So, the keys on the piano went up and down and the female pianist was in realistic 3-D. The shape of things to come.

In the evening we ate at an izakaya restaurant. Low table again, but the floor was lowered so we sat on the floor with feet under the table. A vast spread but no photos, unfortunately.

Friday 29th March,2024

Amara wrote: “The next day we woke up and left for Shin-Hamamatsu station, Roger, staying behind at the hostel. We met Mingo, Yuuki and Ria at the station and we set out for some lunch. For lunch we had a hotpot(sukiyaki). You can make the hotpot your self! After lunch we went for karaoke! It was Amara‘s first time and she loved it but Layla on the other hand did not. There was some Taylor Swift mixed in with Dua Lipa and Black Pink!”

“When the joyful 2 and a half hours had faded away, we went to a nearby Starbucks for some snacks and drinks. Then, we hiked up to Hamamatsu Castle where we could see Fuji-San from. For dinner we went to a sushi restaurant and the restaurant had a TV you could watch!”