Day Twelve: Toyohashi

So im on a shinkansen from Tokyo, shin-yokohama station towards Toyohashi. I have plans set up to stay with a guy named makoto for the night. I know him from the mission.

While im sitting at the station waiting for a transfer, there are these signs there. They are kinda like the Japanese version of the American “truth” ad campaign. Anti-smoking in all types of creative and humorous methods.

They make these signs with sayings like “I put my cigarette out, that is to say I hid it in the drain” or other fun and catchy ditties.

and what a better place to put these pearls of wisdom that at the shinkansen platform designated smoking area.


So I eventually meet makoto at the station, he takes me to his house, we hang out, I feast one some quail eggs and rice, and then we hang out with his parents for an hour or so while his father sips on lots and lots of shoochuu.


It was all terribly kind and hospitable.

I prayed to his cat that it would help me eat some of the quail eggs with me, or at least speak to me. Either language would have worked, but the cat wouldn’t budge. she was stunned.she had never seen me before without missionary clothes before and was naturally stunned at my appearance.


And that was the night. Toyohashi as I had come to know it was the kind of dive town in japan where you could easily go hire a prostitute and then go kill someone with her, leave the next day, and never fear a trip to the ol Japanese jail.

It wasn’t totally horrible, but it was a dive.

Makoto put me to bed promptly at 9pm, breaking my normal bedtime by about five hours, but I didn’t mind, I needed sleep. If I had been on my college sleeping schedule, this is about the time iwould go to sleep with the intention of waking up at 2 or 3am and working on homework that I had put off.

So naturally im laying there on the ground next to makoto at 3 in the morning, wide awake, wondering if ill ever sleep again. I eventually find myself asleep but then start having the weirdest dreams and nightmares.

Then im up, its 7am or somewhere around there. His parents treat me to a breakfast of a raw quail egg mixed with fermented soybeans, melon flavored bread, and some delicious toast stuff his mother made out of vegetables I couldn’t recognize.

This fermented soybean concoction, known as natto, was once something feared by me. The first time I tried it, I ended up throwing up most of the stuff in my stomach and maybe even a little from the first little bit of my small intestine.

It has the consistency of snot, although I think it might be a little bit more sticky, the gooey stuff stays in your mouth until you drink lots of water or clear it out with some other food, the way you might try to eat bread to get a spicy flavor out of your mouth.

But I wasn’t going to let natto beat me. I was told by a dear friend, Michael durney, that if you eat natto every day, no matter how hard, if you force yourself to do it, you will love the taste, consistency, and stickiness after one week.

And he was totally right.

Ive come to love the taste of natto. There was actually a time of my life when I would eat five packs a day of this stuff. The natto I had this morning mixed with a raw quail egg was equally as delicious as I have ever tasted.

Once again, it was terribly hospitable and kind.

I was on the shinkansen at 915am heading towards Nagoya city and from then, gifu.