The Reroute

Incheon after Mongolia is a jolt — an airport with gardens inside it, and cash machines better than the ones at home.

First practical lesson: Google Maps does not work here. Kakao Maps and Naver do, and they are better.

A hostel in Hongdae. Spicy octopus that beat both of us. Couchsurfing meetups in the evenings, which is how you meet anybody.

The DMZ tour was worth doing and did not sit entirely comfortably — the framing is more one-sided than the history teaching either of us grew up with in Germany. The ginseng museum bolted onto the end of the day was pure commerce.

Into Japan by sea rather than air, on the Beetle hydrofoil from Busan — quiet, spacious, and already unmistakably Japanese before it docked.

At the Korean terminal, a glass cabinet of emergency supplies: oxygen masks, water, waiting.

Fukuoka at midday was near-silent and spotless. The hostel sat under a covered shopping street. Dinner was ramen and an Asahi ordered from a ticket machine rather than a person, and the next day sushi at a stall with no tourists in it — about thirty dollars for the best either of us had eaten.

The Shinkansen from Fukuoka, which is worth the trip on its own.

Some hours in the Peace Memorial Museum — the shadows on the stone, the objects. Afterwards the castle, and the rivers, and a city that has decided what it wants to be known for.

Nara for the old temples and the deer that have entirely stopped pretending to be wild.

Kobe for the mountains behind the harbour, and for teppanyaki — the first time either of us had eaten it where it comes from, cooked in front of us with more technique than the beef strictly required.

East along the Tōkaidō line and out through Tokyo, which is the one city on this route that costs more than home rather than less.

Mount Fuji from the aircraft window on the way out, which is luck rather than planning.