Japan Trip 2026: Toyohashi
April 4th, 2026
This is either the most anticipated portion of my trip to Japan or the least. I lived and worked in Toyohashi over twenty years ago as an English teacher. Now after I finally return the only person who still lives in Toyohashi, remembers me, and kept in touch is a bartender.
When I travelled to Japan in 1992 there was basically no Internet and no digital cameras. When I lived and worked in Europe approximately ten years later I didn’t have a digital camera and this web domain may not have been registered or was in a fledgling state. So when I finally returned to Japan in 2004 to teach English I made sure to have a digital camera and had this website up and running.
I didn’t have a laptop however, nor were digital cameras or cellphone cameras anywhere near what we have today. I updated this website with text editors on random computers in Internet Cafes. This blog was put online prior to going on exchange to Beijing, so my time there is much more documented than my time in Toyohashi. I also returned to Beijing sooner, agreeing to visit China in 2014. I even worked and taught English in Shanghai for much longer than I did in Japan.
Nonetheless Japan will always hold a special place in my heart. To the amazement of some and the disdain of others I’ve kept this website online for over twenty years, so in 2026 when I finally returned for an extended tour of Japan I knew I had to visit Toyohashi and try to dig up some old photos and mementos from my previous visits. However, I should have done more research, but I just didn’t have time and hadn’t given Toyohashi much thought recently. I missed out on seeing some things by only visiting on one Wednesday.
The view immediately after getting off the train. I never took the Shinkansen much back in the day, but I did travel by the Meitetsu Line to Nagoya and back many times.
I actually exited the hotel on the ground level, but came back to the hotel via the overpass before it started raining too much.
This is the street level view, though I likely spent most of my time on the other side of the street. I ended up taking the underpass before the light changed and found a surprise.
This is the alley beside the building in which I worked. There was an izakaya just down the alley on the left we always went to, including for my goodbye party.
When I returned to Toyohashi I had no doubt where I was staying though I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. On my last night in Toyohashi prior to this I stayed at a different hotel just off to the left, it had a good view too, but the Hotel Associa is probably the biggest hotel in Toyohashi. It is attached to the train station making it super convenient. There might be an even more expensive boutique hotel on the other side, but because I worked on this side, lived on this side, this is the part of Toyohashi I know best.
Toyohashi Festivals
Toyohashi is not a famous tourist destination. It is on the Shinkansen train line and two others so it is easy enough to visit, you can fly to Nagoya international airport which is about an hour away. There was considerably less information on Japan online twenty plus years ago, now all the festivals I attended while living in Toyohashi are well documented.
I remember the demon festival and dutifully dug out a picture of the demon running by in 2004. I also remember so many fireworks, apparently Toyohashi is famous for fireworks. I remembered the dancing in the street though not the space shuttle. I read a blog post prior to returning to Japan about a blogger who visited Toyohashi who wanted to know about the space shuttle. I think it is a pachinko place but maybe someone can leave an answer in the comments. Finally I remembered and had grainy video taken on my keitai of people carrying a wooden shrine through the streets.
I almost never post video online and it isn’t in Apple Photos. It could still be on an old memory card. It is unlikely I would have deleted it. I do have backups going back to 2002, but I did lose some data to a hard drive issue in Beijing which I feared would cost me my MBA or at least delay graduation. I took another look for it just now and I could not find it. I should have put it in Apple Photos or iPhoto as it was known back then.
The dancing in the street festival in Toyohashi isn’t as famous as the one in Tokushima which I learned about when I visited Junichi another person who I likely have not heard from since I left Japan. That festival is called Awa Odori.
- Demon Festival – Oni Matsuri
- Fireworks Festival – Toyohashi Gio Festival
- Dancing in the Street Festival – Sou Odori parade
- Shrine Carrying Festival – Minato-machi Shinmei-sha Shrine Annual Festival
The next photo proves the space shuttle was there in 2003. I also had the foresight to go up a level to take a picture of all the people dancing in the street. At the end of the night they play “Auld Lang Syne” which I was told was the “go home song”. I don’t know if they still play it at the end of the night, leave a comment below if you are a Toyohashi festival regular.
Digital cameras have improved a lot since I lived in Toyohashi.
Toyohashi Then & Now
Twenty years ago, well closer to twenty-two years ago isn’t that long in the history of Japan and maybe not that much has changed in Toyohashi between living there and then visiting again in 2026, but I did scour my computer and the Internet for pictures and information. Paying for web hosting for twenty plus years wasn’t a small expense for an English teacher who had less than a 1000 yen at one point in my emails.
It has changed a little, but same basic location and layout, it is 1760 and 1210 now.
The East Orange in Toyohashi in 2004
The East Orange in Toyohashi in 2026
Sitting on the floor playing guitar, or listening to music, or reading a book was something I did a lot of while in Toyohashi. Of course I did study Japanese and for the GMAT. I eventually got a desk and when I went home at Christmas to visit my grandfather who was worried he’d die while I was abroad, I brought back some miniatures and some paints. But there were definitely some lean times. My bank account is considerable better than it was in those days or even ten years ago. I don’t want to think how much was spent on whisky on this trip, but I actually was the least big spender, though I bought more than my share of drams.
Above are miniatures I painted while living in Toyohashi Japan, they are metal Nurgle Plaguebearers and Plague Marines. If you’re wondering what this is all about, I put together a webpage a long time ago.
Seibukan Bookstore
When I returned to Toyohashi over twenty years later, a lot had changed. I had no trouble finding where I used to work, it was right near the train station. The alley beside where I used to work of course had not moved, then on what I thought of as the main drag was the bookstore, which brought back a lot of memories.
I read a lot while I lived in Japan. I used to read a lot more. This was the only bookstore I knew of in Toyohashi that sold English books and magazines. I paid a premium for them. I read the books previous teachers had left behind those included “The Wandering Bus” and “Snow Falling on Cedars”. There might have been other books left behind, but they obviously weren’t as memorable. Whenever I went to Tokyo I would alway buy more books and magazine. I shipped my books home from Japan, China, and Scotland. I never did that in Ottawa.
Back in the day, there were always men standing outside reading very specific magazines. That must now be frowned upon, not that those magazines don’t still exist, but I wouldn’t have had the foresight to take a photo if there were not men always reading magazines in front of Seibukan. Standing and reading is a very Japanese thing to do, or it was back in the day.
More Toyohashi
Although the original blog post I found about Toyohashi was difficult to relocate, I did try to find more about Toyohashi than I knew before. Eventually I found a YouTuber who lives in Toyohashi and likes ramen. His videos will be auto-translated to English if you watch them on YouTube.com, he does all sorts of things in Japan and makes videos about his travels and activities.
The school I worked at is long gone but the building remains. The alley with the izakaya was still there as was the bookstore and maybe the McDonald’s was there in 2004, but after that a lot has changed. Toyohashi has a bigger expat community now I’m lead to believe and it always had Brazilians and Filipinos. It is too bad I lost touch with so many people, but after a while I got tired of being the one expending all the effort to stay in touch.
Apparently you can just walk around filming and upload it to the Internet. This guy took almost the exact route as me when I arrived in Toyohashi after twenty two years, except I never went down the alley. In fact I don’t even remember going past the izakaya we always went to. He too does not walk quite as far as my old apartment, but I never actually watched until the end of the video.
Memory prices must have come down a lot in the last twenty-two years. I can’t even find a few seconds of video I took from back then, which would have likely been grainy and a couple hundred pixels wide. I remember buying a memory card in the jungle’s of Cambodia so I could take more photos. I bought one in China too which famously died taking all the pictures on it to Silicon Heaven. Those old memory cards may be at my mom’s or perhaps they are in a storage bin in my bedroom, assuming they can still be accessed, the video must have been on my Mac at some point but now it is just gone.
I scoured the Internet, as I didn’t recall there being a covered shopping street or Shotengai in Toyohashi. It doesn’t look as impressive as because everything is closed on Wednesday or at least in the morning. I think the guy doing the walking video gets there eventually. If you know when this street right next to the Seibukan was built leave a comment, I honestly don’t remember it and I went down the street with the Seibukan hundreds of times.
If you just go by the Internet there seem to be more bars in Toyohashi than I remembered, but there were probably always lots, I was just poor and stuck to the same one or two spots between work and my apartment, even when someone else planned an outing it was usually nearby and on our side of the train station.
Bars and Restaurants
There are a lot of bars and restaurants around the station. I am not sure of the name of the restaurant we went to, but we sat on the floor and cooked what I’m confident was internal organs and intestines, which would not have been my first choice. Then afterward we went to his friend’s bar which is BUZZLE BUNCH.
Not sure I want to know exactly what I ate, but I have a suspicion.
The East Orange was closed as it was the owners day off. I don’t think either of these places is the most popular or famous in Toyohashi. But a band I had actually heard of was set to play the BUZZLE BUNCH soon. Banana Needle was shown to me by the algorithm. It features a female keyboardist/Hammond Organ player. There are a lot of Japanese bands with women members or even all women bands. Boris of course has Wata, but I don’t think I follow them on Instagram but I do follow @ChieGretsch aka Chie Horiguchi and there were two Western Orange Gretsch 6120s on the wall of the BUZZLE BUNCH.
Apparently there is a craft brewery in Toyohashi now called TOYS. I really should have researched more, but I just didn’t have time due to professional development taking up all my free time. There is apparently a great website on craft beer tourism in Japan now. There wasn’t much craft beer in Japan in 2003, another missed business opportunity I suppose. I think if I did a beer tour it would be to Belgium.
Toyohashi also apparently has a famous whisky bar. I learned this from Stamford who is @Japan_Whisky_Tours on the ‘Gram. It is called Gemor and may have been open when I lived there, but like a lot of places in Japan it is small and flew under the radar for a while, but now people seek it out. It specializes in American bourbon.
Ramen Shops
I spent a lot of time trying ramen when I lived in Toyohashi. I didn’t even know the name of some of the places I liked to eat at, it was harder being a foreigner in Japan before the World Cup and smart phones. Not only are some of the ramen shops I visited like Momoyama and Jandara still open in Toyohashi, perhaps the most infamous one survives. It is apparently called Kuroda-ya. I didn’t even know the name back in the day, I just found it by this sign.
They serve spicy Tonkotsu broth which is made from up to 500 kg of pork bones per day. Now having found this video and learned so much more about Toyohashi, I regret not having taken more time to research things more prior to traveling. But my trip back to Toyohashi was a bit impulsive, and my time was limited however it would have been nice to have visited Kuroda-ya or a few other spots I documented. One day in Toyohashi clearly wasn’t enough time, especially as it was only a partial day and a Wednesday at that. Lots of things in Toyohashi are closed on Wednesday, including Kuroda-ya which apparently is also closed Tuesday.
YouTube and the auto-translation feature which is likely part of the Google translate app really does help when traveling, I never knew the name of this restaurant even though I ate there on many, many weekends will living in Toyohashi. I even learned the Chinese characters, 黒田屋. So I’ll see if I can scare up a webpage or Instagram account, but honestly I did not expect to find a YouTube video about an obscure ramen shop I last visited over twenty years ago.
More Pictures from my time in Toyohashi
I probably always ment to post more pictures to the Internet, especially as I also pay for Flickr and have done so for years, I just never got around to it. Most of these pictures have never been seen by another human being and I probably forgot I took some of them. But before I left Toyohashi I did bike around taking pictures of places that were important to me. I wish I had some more photos of the streets near my apartment or perhaps of the basketball gym we played in, but I did document all my favourite ramen shops, some which are still open. However, back in those days, I never thought to take pictures of the actual bowls of ramen, I was more concerned with helping people find the shops without smart phones and Google Maps which just did not exist.
This blog post went through many edits, but if you have any further thoughts on Toyohashi you can leave them below. After eating and drinking and walking around taking photos I travelled to Tokyo for one last reunion before returning to Canada.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Travel and tagged: Expat, Japan, Toyohashi.
