i hadn't been making my way back to tokyo along the tokaido for no reason, what had kicked off that trip was something that had happened the same day of my too-long inuyama castle visit and my too-brief meiji mura tour: i had accepted an invite from shibs to accompany him and an old school friend on a little trip to choshi the next weekend. the choshi peninsula is the vaguely mammarial outgrowth protruding into the pacific east of tokyo past narita, i was familiar with it because it's where international flights from the US make landfall in japan on approach to narita airport, besides signifying the end of the long journey, seeing its distinct shape out the plane window is a welcome change in pace after hours of monotonous blue.

the motivation for the trip was to perform a type of otaku cultural activity known as "seichi junrei" (聖地巡礼), which in japanese means "pilgrimage to sacred places". obviously for otaku this means visiting the locations where anime or manga are set, in this case the holy text inspiring our pilgrimage was "amagami", of which shibs was a devotee. originally a PS2 dating game, it spawned two seasons of well-respected anime adaptations about 15 years ago. although my very particular tastes leave me with a lot of gaps, i wasn't left out because by some fortuitous coincidence i had watched the anime adaptation "amagami SS" not even six months before. since the anime the franchise has been kept on life support through a drip of occasional anniversary events, merch drops, and voice actress ASMR cds. one of those schemes was a collaboration with the local tourism bureau (the show wears its setting, choshi, on its sleeve) and various attractions last year to put together a stamp rally, which i guess had been such a success that they had indefinitely extended it up to the present day. it also provided a good basis/excuse for our seichi junrei, in many cases they must be performed purely out of love of the game, with no official support or reward besides the photos you take.

i arrived in tokyo the evening beforehand so that i could rendezvous with shibs and drop off all the ill-advised manga purchases that had been weighing me down, afterwards we stopped for dinner at a nearby ramen joint (the only time i had ramen the whole trip), we kept it quick because we had to get up quite early the next morning. the plan was to head to a cheap rental car place on the edge of town soon after the open, then drive out to choshi. to ease the burden on myself physically and financially, i strategically booked a place for the night only three stops away on the keisei line from the car rental place. it was going to be a little exciting too because it was one of japan's legendary capsule hotels, which i've never stayed in before.

now, i've heard some people saying there's no "real" capsule hotels left in japan, only modern spruced-up imitations for tourists, however after staying at this place i can assure you they still exist if you go out far enough. it was a real relic, parts of it looked untouched since the nineties, preserved through fastidious maintenance in the usual japanese manner. the hotel wasn't entirely capsules, instead it was a normal budget hotel with one floor as a men-only "capsule floor". on the capsule floor, there was a central common room that the rest of the facilities branched off from: a narrow locker room, toilets, the baths (basically a miniature onsen with 4 sitting showers in a row and one big pool), and then a T-shaped room lined with rows of capsules stacked two high. i stashed my bag in my assigned locker and then sat down alone in the lounge drinking the beverage i'd bought at the convenience store just beforehand (f&b weren't allowed in the capsules), staring at this big keisei calendar on the wall that made such an impression that while on my way to the airport later via the keisei skyliner i stopped at the station shop and purchased the 2026 editionthe cover features the type of train i rode five minutes after buying it.

afterwards, i retired to my capsule, a plastic prefabricated pod that over the years had yellowed into an unpleasant yellow-beige color like an old super nintendo, or perhaps that had been the color from the start. the front of each one had a shutter that rolled down covered in one of those frumpy fabrics you only see at grandma's house or the thrift store, i kept it about half open because otherwise the summer heat made it stuffy inside, similar to what had happened at the hostels i'd stayed at. inside the capsule, there was a built-in fan vent that didn't do much, some buttons to control the lights and stuff, and the mold also included a big protrusion from the top that held a tv. whatever little crt the mold had been designed to fit had clearly been replaced at some point by a tiny flat-screen tv, it had all the usual business hotel channels plus an extra one that seemed local to the establishment that was just playing porn. the hotel was directly adjacent to the keisei main line, the tracks were even visible out the capsule room window, which meant that you could hear and feel every train rumble by approximately every five minutes. i knew there'd eventually be a reprieve after they stop running around midnight, but i also knew that i'd get woken up the second the first train of the day came by around at 5:00am... for the stranded salarymen staying there, that's probably a bonus because they'll know right away when the trains start running again so they can get home, or to work... i wasn't so torn up about it either since i had to get up early the next morning too.

that next morning, i was indeed woken up by the first keisei line train, though i put in some ear plugs and they were surprisingly effective at granting me another two hours or so of sleep. then, i chugged a canned coffee and hopped on the train to the designated meetup station, it wasn't too crowded since i was heading away from the city. shibs was running a little late, but his friend didn't have much trouble finding me loitering outside the station, despite us having never met before. once shibs showed up we walked a couple blocks down to pick up our rental car from "nico nico rental car", japan's leading discount rental car chain, the local "branch" of which ended up being two parking spaces attached to the side of a gas station. our car was a daihatsu tanto, a make that you almost never see outside of japan because they pretty much exclusively manufacture kei cars. i had a pretty positive impression of kei cars after my experience in noto, but i don't think it would have been so positive had my first time been with a tanto, it made the honda n-box look like the cadillac of kei cars. the inside of the tanto was barebones and exceptionally underpowered, the poor thing struggled to make it up hills and was permanently relegated to the slow lane on the expressway.

when we got in, shibs produced a real live ETC card, sliding it into the card reader installed inside the glove compartment. that's right, on this trip we'd be hitting the expressways. for once when the car was started it didn't complain that the ETC card wasn't inserted, instead it informed us of the card's validity period. our car rental location had also been carefully chosen to put us close to an expressway entrance, so it wasn't long before the faregates were yielding to our approach, recognizing the equipped ETC card. the expressways in the tokyo urban area were completely closed off from the rest of the city, you couldn't tell at all where you were because they ran either underground in tunnels for impressive distances or were cocooned within these tall soundproofily walls that curved inward at the top, you just had to trust the GPS or the road signs to know where to get off, the expressway network was like a sparse tubular pocket dimension just for transportation.

eventually, we emerged from the tubes and tunnels in an area where the fields and the forests were starting to outnumber the buildings. it was a familiar landscape, the narita international airport environs, the first and last thing i see of the country every trip during the train ride between the city and the airport. shibs had put together a mix for the trip, mostly songs from amagami, but somewhere around this point one of the later non non biyori openings came on and i almost teared up, something about the bittersweet tone seemed to reflect the impending end of summer and my time in japan. surprisingly, the expressway did not extend out all the way to choshi, so at some point we took an exit and rejoined the dense confusing network of surface roads and barely-distinguishable national routes (国道). for obscure reasons, we crossed a big river and then later crossed back over what appeared to be the same river in order to arrive right in the heart of choshi.

we started our tour by parking in the center of town by the rail station, the exact same place we would have ended up had we decided to take the train instead. our first goal was the tourist information center inside the station, the source of the stamp rally stamp cards, shibs also likes to stop by them to harvest local recommendations. disaster struck immediately: the two slightly-flustered office ladies regretfully informed us that due to circumstances, the amagami stamp rally had recently been indefinitely suspended, apparently nobody had remembered to announce this on the official channels online. they did have an official amagami choshi tourism map pointing out all the spots from the show that we grabbed, though we didn't really need it because shibs had already done all that research beforehand, preparing a whole google doc called the "choshi hit list" with every spot and the best nearby place to park, usually a family restaurant or convenience store. disappointed by the suspension of the stamp rally, we still picked up some recommendations for local attractions, like a soy sauce factory visitor's center within quick walking distance of the station. then, as we were about to leave, the ladies beckoned us back to the counter and told us in a conspiratorial tone that they did have something amagami-related they could give us if we could keep it secret, because they really weren't supposed to be giving them out... you won't tell that i told, right?

outside, shibs told us the significance of the postcards: they were supposed to be the prize for completing the stamp rally! i guess they still had some lying around... just like that, immediately upon arriving in choshi and without doing a thing we'd technically accomplished our ostensible goal for the trip... but of course, this was not going to discourage us from visiting the spots from the show and doing the rest of the seichi junrei. shibs started as soon as we exited the station, taking pictures of the "welcome to choshi" sculpture just outside and the main shopping street (dead, lined with shuttered business, sort of depressing) extending out from it perpendicularly. then, we walked over to the yamasa soy sauce brewery, one of the largest in the country. choshi has long been associated with soy sauce, yamasa is one of those "SINCE 1645" japanese companies, back in the day they would use the nearby tone river to ship big barrels of it to edo, according to an interpretive sign in the visitor's center (another one said that they have another brewery overseas in... salem, OR?!). they had a tasting area where you could pour free samples into little trays and sip them with tiny spoons, and a window where you could order soy sauce soft serve and cola (not as bad as you might think). finally, we walked a few blocks down to visit the family restaurant where one of the characters worked, that location had closed a couple years ago so it ended up just being an empty lot. there was, however, a single big bush growing out of the middle of the former parking lot:

⊕unfortunately, the park i most wanted to see from the show, the distinctive hilltop one where the protagonist was traumatically stood up on christmas eve, doesn't appear to be a real place...we got back in the car and drove a couple minutes down one of the main roads, parked at a 7-11, then crossed the street to visit a playground that appeared in several episodes. while awkwardly keeping our distance from some locals there, shibs asked me if i knew what "amagami" means in japanese. i did not, later i found out it's because it was in the OVA which i hadn't watched yet, in a scene that took place in that very park. "amagami" (甘噛み) means play-biting or fighting (e.g. by pets, in the show a cat and her kitten are seen doing this while the protagonist's little sister explains), the characters literally mean "sweet bite". in my interpretation, this is in reference to the signature scenes of the amagami series, its moments of "complex eroticism"... tummy kisses in the back rows of the library, finger biting, "would you slurp me if i was a miso ramen"... to call it fanservice would be incorrect, it's not at all your crude and hackneyed "walking in on her showering" or "falling down on top of her and accidentally grabbing a handful of boob" (both of which to be inevitably followed by her turning scarlet, yelling "バカ!", retaliating physically, etc. etc., it's all so tiresome). the "amagami moments" are much more creative, subtle... a surface layer of plausible deniability is maintained, the ambiguity of flirting, the sugar conceals the teeth... most importantly, it's not one-sided, it's a dance, it's play.

⊕we got back in the car and drove less than a mile down the road before pulling in and parking at a coco's location that was really bustling, possibly because it was the only remaining family restaurant in town (just down the street, there was an empty building that had clearly once been a saizeriya). once again, we crossed the street and went down a little road winding around a hillside in order to visit one of the most important locations from the show: the approach to school that appears in nearly every episode, with its distinctive retaining wall.

then, we drove down the road a little further and parked at a different 7-11, even in the inaka they're still packed pretty dense. its oddly-expansive parking lot contained something a little unusual: a neat little shack that was home to a dryer-only laundromat, i suppose this makes sense considering that in japan it's pretty common to own only a washing machine. chumps hang their clothes on the balcony, meanwhile the real ball knowers pop by the 7-11 parking lot to dry their stuff for a hundred yen per eight minutes. ⊕we walked down the narrow streets of a rural neighborhood, the houses occasionally punctuated by farm plots. for some reason in choshi the fields were not rural japan's ubiquitous rice paddies, instead they were all planted with long rows of... CABBAGES! at the edge of the hood, we turned down a road into the heart of the cabbage patches, perplexed farmers on tractors in the background probably wondering what this strange trio was doing out there, then beheld what might be the most important amagami vista, which appears at the end of every single episode over the preview.

⊕upon returning to the car, we backtracked down the road and went past the station to a shrine on top of a forested hill, accessed via a staircase with rises so short and runs so long that it really should have just been a ramp. for shibs this was one of the most important stops, it was the one most strongly associated with his favorite girl, ayatsuji-san (she seems like a very fitting choice for him, too). i reflected briefly on the odd structure of our trip so far, a sort of reverse location scouting, reverent visits to a collection of mundane spots in the area. but next up we'd finally be on our way towards something that would actually be considered a tourist attraction... shibs had asked me a couple times beforehand if there was anywhere i wanted to go in choshi, and i always repeated the same thing: the choshi port tower.

⊕⊕luckily, the tower was not a hard sell because it had in fact appeared in an episode of amagami, and when we entered the gift shop, it was the first place we'd been to so far that had a bunch of amagami stuff around, though to be fair those other places had all been random public parks or roads. the whole back corner was given over to amagami, including a big display for amagami merchanside, unfortunately by now the last merch drop had been a while ago and they were completely sold out of everything except for a handful of character goods for the least popular characters. nearby, they had a thick guestbook where amagami fans could write messages (from reading a few i found out they call themselves アマガミスト, amagamists), it looked like there were thousands of entries, amagami fans were possibly singlehandedly propping up the choshi tourism industry. i left an undated and unattributed message that said "AMERICA STILL REMEMBERS AMAGAMI!!!" a good amount of floorspace was also dedicated to a rotating amagami exhibition, the current one was a "famous scenes" exhibit curated and commentated on by the showrunner. most of them were the "amagami signature scenes" i previously discussed (as i argued, it's what the series is all about), including every single one i referenced in my original review of the show, plus a couple that i didn't recognize at all (shibs explained they were from the sequel amagami ss+, which i hadn't seen yet). up in the tower's observation deck, there was a big display with a plaque certifying that in 2022, the "anime tourism association" had voted choshi as one of the "88 anime spots to visit". on the docks nearby, there were rows of tetrapods lined up, soldiers standing at the ready awaiting deployment to the front lines of the war against nature. we spent a couple minutes up there scouring the floor looking for the area with the glass floor that had featured in the episode set there (part of another thrilling "amagami moment" where they kiss on top of the glass), then i remembered that i had previously researched this and found out that they had used a bit of artistic license for that bit, it didn't actually exist.

coming down from the tour, we crossed a bridge over the road and visited "Wosse 21" (how did they cook up that name?), a souvenir/fish market targeted at tourists. it had clearly seen better days, the building was shabby and there were many gaps in the lineup of vendors, even after they'd sneakily plugged a bunch by filling them with gashapon machines and the like. the lack of attention had one benefit: at wosse they had actually forgotten to withdraw their amagami stamp rally stamp, so we were able to unofficially collect one of the stamps after all. we stopped to eat at the attached wosse restaurant, usually the sort of place i'd try to avoid because it gave off the appearance of being aggressively mid, but they served sashimi and it was right by the coast, surely it can't be hard to not mess up not cooking fresh fish?

next up was a place that's a real mouthful, chikyuu-no-marukumieru-oka tenboukan (地球の丸く見える丘展望館), the "observatory on the hill where you can see the roundness of the earth". it had a parking lot that seemed vastly out of proportion with the maximum number of visitors they could ever realistically expect to get at one time. though as far as i can recall the amagami scenes set there were only in the park outside⊕, we also went into the observatory, another building clad in japan's favorite favorite façade material, the humble beige tile. it really was placed atop a unique spot, a hill right at the center of the peninsula that was also its tallest point. you could see almost the entire peninsular from above, and the majority of the horizon was ocean. presumably the long ocean horizon is supposed to appear curved rather than flat due to the roundness of the earth, but i dunno, i still couldn't really see it after standing on the rooftop designated curvature viewing pedestal. what i did see was a huge storm cloud in the distance casting a menacing shadow over the ocean, and it seemed to be heading right for us. this prompted us to clear out ASAP, without listening to more than a minute or two of the amagami ASMR setup they had down in the observatory building, the parking lot was quite a distance away and we had no rain gear...

just as planned, our hotel was only a short drive down the hill away, so we checked in and bummed around for a bit until dinnertime. we decided to go to what seemed to be the only finer dining establishment in town, a seafood joint called "ichiyama ikesu". ⊕as he's used to doing, shibs called them to try and put in a reservation, but i guess they weren't too busy because they basically said "nah it's fine you can just show up whenever". for a restaurant in japan its interior was pretty large, mainly because the middle was taken up by these wide open tanks with some fish lazily swimming around in them. i later found out that “ikesu” (生け簀) means fish pen, and the “ikesu restaurant” is an obscure genre of japanese seafood restaurant where they try to serve you the absolute freshest fist possible by storing them alive in the pens.

when we sat down at our table, it was also immediately clear that we were on japanese restaurant "hard mode", the main menu of daily specials featured a bunch of fish-related characters/words i don't know and was printed in one of those annoying hard-to-parse handwriting fonts, plus the prices were all in japanese numerals. what's worse, the way you ordered was by WRITING down what you wanted on a slip of paper and handing it to the waitress. once we'd decided mostly off of vibes and chance what to order, i snatched the pencil and insisted on trying to write it myself, wanting to show off the writing skills i'd been taught in some of my college japanese classes (which i always decried as a waste of time, this isolated incident has not changed my mind).⊕ it turns out i was way overconfident, i immediately humiliated myself by messing up not even a kanji character but a katakana, turns out my writing ability had completely deteriorated after five years without having written a single thing in japanese, who could have guessed. anyways, between the three of us, we eventually managed to put together a legible order. the star of the show ended up being the sanma (pacific saury, if that even means anything to anyone) that we ordered on a whim because it was a seasonal special, everyone agreed that it was incredible. later online, i saw a bunch of posts along the lines of "guys, if you're in japan, try the sanma, the harvest has been great this year and it tastes AMAZING!", so i guess we miraculously made the right call.

upon returning to the hotel, it was of course time for beers and baths. while pregaming for the onsen in our room (和風, i insisted when we booked), i suddenly declared that i was finally going to do it, i was going to register for the upcoming JLPT N1 exam right there and now, only to open up the website and discover that registration had closed one day ago. i drunkenly raged for a bit about how it's bullshit that it's only offered in the US once annually and how the registration window is open only for like a month three whole months in advance, then we headed for the onsen to chill out. our hotel was separated from the water by only some piles of tetrapods and a narrow little access road, so the main attraction in the bathing facilities was a bath with big windows overlooking the water, while being all calm and toasty inside you can enjoy gazing at the frigid raging ocean waters outside. the view could have been a bit better, the windows were covered in salt spray and condensation, but oh well. later, we discovered that the baths had a back room with a cozy sauna and a faux-natural bath fed by a little waterfall coasting down a wall of various boulders glued together with cement in vague imitation of a cliff face, a classic look.

back up in the room, we were completely out of booze but i wasn't quite ready yet to call it a night. so, we went on an expedition down to the lobby to see if they had one of those beer vending machines that so far i'd seen in pretty much every japanese hotel i'd stayed at, starting with the first discovery in phoenix seagaia. after a fruitless search, out of frustration i flung open a random unmarked door (i SWEAR this actually happened) and revealed a creepy staircase down to a derelict basement nightclub that must have been shuttered 15+ years ago, there were glitzy finishings and yellowing vintage posters framed on the wall. i was too freaked-out to penetrate very far, but in the dim light i could see that the former dancefloor at the bottom was now being used for storage, stacked with old furniture. after that unexpected discovery, we headed back up and called it a night.

on shibs' initiative, we all woke up extremely early in order to go out to the cape and catch the sunrise. there was a convenient paved path from the hotel down to the cape that even included a little TUNNEL, it must have been there for a quite a while because some parts of the path had clearly been rerouted due to shifting of the coast over the years, you could even see the ruins of the old path in some places. there were actually a surprising amount of people out there watching the sunrise, it's apparently a pretty notable spot, though i'm not exactly convinced it's the "first place the sun rises in japan" as shibs claimedaccording to wikipedia, the furthest east point of japan is "minamitorishima", one of those miserable remote atolls with a landing strip that was only ever briefly relevant during the pacific war, held on to only so that they can claim an extra EEZ around it. but at least it's less dubiously an island than japan's "furthest south point" okinotorishima, basically a shallow reef the government has spent millions pouring concrete on to keep a very small part of it above water in order to claim it's an island. on our way back, hordes of tiny black creatures scattered across the path as we approached the tunnel, part of what lent the whole excursion a strange dream-like quality after we went back to sleep and woke up for real a couple hours later.

after checking out, we started off by returning to the cape, this time driving the short distance over there. there was a lighthouse and then a whole complex of buildings that included a retirement home (?) and a food/souvenir market that actually seemed to be thriving, lots of tourists around. we got brunch at a nice little restaurant inside, shibs & friend each got an 800 yen loco moco whereas i carefully studied the menu and discovered an insane weekend breakfast special, a 360 yen "breakfast set" with coffee, french toast, a little salad, and bacon. i reflected briefly on how this would be completely impossible in the US, a cute cafe at a tourist spot with delicious food and reasonable prices. then ⊕we went up into the cramped lighthouse and looked out at the waves crashing against the rocks like they do in the iconic toei film company logo, which i later found out was filmed at that exact spot.

⊕we wrapped up the amagami location tour by visiting two of the beaches that had been featured in the show, one on either side of the cape. the second one had a lot going on, it was adjacent to the byoubugaura cliffs that are sometimes called japan's "dover cliffs" even though they're not white at all, and it was also home to the self-proclaimed "world's smallest aquarium". even though the world's smallest aquarium was supposed to be home to some amagami stuff, we didn't go in because the 300 yen admission charge for the world's SMALLEST aquarium seemed a little rich for my blood, after all i had just had a meal for only a little more than that. instead, we opted for something free, a walk on the path alongside the cliffs. on that walk, we found out where all the tetrapods lined up at the choshi port were probably going: the natural beauty of the cliffs was being "protected" from erosion by an ugly little tetrapod wall running in front of them across their entire length. in fact, the paved path we were walking on lay directly on top of said tetropods, though it may not have been much to look at it was a pretty thrilling to walk on, absorbing the brunt of the ocean's assaults on behalf of the cliffs meant that the path and tetrapods were decaying in their place, creating huge cracks in the path and causing a large portion of it to be tilted at exciting angles. frankly, the path was in such compromised condition in places that we weren't even sure we were allowed to be walking on it...⊕this poor old tetrapod is now a tripod...

having finished up with the amagami locations, before leaving choshi we stopped at a couple other spots in the area that had caught our eye. there was this conspicuous buddhist temple at the foot of the "roundness of the earth" hill, we stopped there and strolled through its halls, a couple parts insided reminded me of the shrine on the second floor of the great peace prayer tower, and there was a vague musty odor like the one you encounter in cheap run-down business hotels. nearby was also what you might call the flagship station of the choshi electric railway, which operates a single 10-station rail line that extends from choshi station to the end of the peninsula, running a distance of just four miles. it has survived mainly as a local icon and curiosity for tourists to ride, though the aggressive promotional campaigns and cost-cutting measures like buying used vintage rolling stock for ~$10k or having the company president take shifts driving trains still aren't quite enough to keep the rail line afloat on its own, according to something i saw online 80% of the "plucky" railway's income comes from selling a souvenir rice cracker. the station building was one of those japanese imitations of european-style architecture, it was pretty crowded with tourists inside since it was the weekend (and the train only comes once hourly). the interior was cluttered with the detritus from decades worth of promotional collaborations, posters and cardboard standees of anime characters and the like (somehow it never appeared in amagami though), the mostly-extraneous second floor especially was given over to all sorts of strange stuff, though also stuff you might expect like a rail photograph gallery and diorama. our final stop before leaving the choshi area was a local microbrewery, where of course we encountered the first foreign tourists we'd seen the whole trip, two dudes from denver in the country on business sampling local IPAs...

on the way back, i insisted on finally taking the wheel of the tanto for a bit, i couldn't leave japan without getting a taste of the expressways. it didn't end up being that thrilling since we were consigned to the slow lane the entire time, and then on entering the tokyo area i encountered something i'd never thought i'd see: TRAFFIC! IN NIPPON!

the following day, i got a message from shibs: there had been an announcement that they were restarting the amagami stamp rally effective immediately, we'd missed it by one day...