Day 4

Day four required minimal physical effort but offered lots of opportunities to watch the Japanese countryside slide by, as the only thing we were expected to do was pile into various forms of transportation and drink Pocari Sweat.

Our previous tour of Hyogo Works had made us connoisseurs of aerodynamic bullet-train shells, smooth bogies (i.e. chassis), and the kind of public transport that reaches speeds of 285 kilometers per hour, so we were well-equipped to appreciate the Series 700 model we boarded in Kobe, taking over most of one car and cramming giant Ogio gear bags onto shelves above the other (now dismayed) passengers. Kawasaki's hard-working PR Manager, Jan Plessner, quickly cleaned out all available stock of miniature bullet trains so that each journalist could have one (as most had by now regressed to spoiled children anyway); in the picture at top, Jan mugs with Speed TV's Neale Bayly—an exceptionally friendly guy who's known to sometimes fake an English accent.

After disembarking in Hakata, it was onto another bus for the last leg of the day's journey, which dropped us at Hotel Nikko Kumamoto after winding around the city's most famous and dominant landmark, Kumamoto Castle. Originally built in 1607, it was passed (not politely) from clan to clan throughout the next few centuries, various sections of it were burned to the ground several times, and it was the site of Japan's 1877 civil war, which all mainstream theater-goers know had a lot to do with Tom Cruise.

It added up to one serious, aesthetically beautiful piece of history, and the castle's organic wood-and-stone construction was a nice contrast to the metal-focused modern technology we'd been admiring for the past few days. And after studying the period samurai uniforms on display in the castle's museum, it became clear that an army of Laurels vs. an army of samurais would result in an entirely bloodless battle. They could pretty much just call and say they were coming.

The history theme continued into the evening, when we were taken out for a traditional sit-down Japanese dinner (sit way down) complete with geisha—a woman who first danced for the group, then sat down among some suddenly flummoxed American males, who soon became—perhaps for the first time in their lives—utterly fascinated by and committed to conversation about the process of arranging hair and applying makeup.