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This turned out to be the saddest day of the holiday. We all started off in good spirits, though, and all had our stuff packed (we had to take Yuhei's stuff for him, since he hadn't stayed the previous night). We thanked the ryokan's owners, paid up, and headed off - with a couple of hours to spare before our train to Kyoto, myself, George and Fox decided to head off to Harajuku to hit a few more firecrackers in Nike Park. Since it turned out to be the hottest, most humid day of the entire holiday, we were all doing our best impressions of DV by the time we made it back to Tokyo station to get the bullet train south.

There followed an hour or two's pleasant banter on the train, while I tried unsuccessfully to understand the Japanese radio commentary on the afternoon match. All I could work out was that one of the commentators' sole contribution was to go "Eh!" in a DV-like voice at regular intervals. We found out later that this must have been the sound of France losing 2-0 to Denmark.

Then came the bad news. Yuhei's grandfather, who had been ill for some time, had passed away. As is traditional, the funeral would be the next day. Yuhei had no choice but to get off at the next station and go straight back. We weren't going to see him again before leaving the country.

We were all, of course, very sad and disappointed. As well as the sad death, which Yuhei told us had been expected, we knew that Yuhei had been looking forward to the game as much as we had (it was the only days he'd managed to get off work for our entire visit) and we now were going to have to sell his much-prized ticket.

Forty-five minutes later, the remaining five of us were in Kyoto, and had to try to find our way to the ryokan without our expert guide. Once we'd got onto the tube, we kept hearing amusing announcements about the "Honkee line", which cheered us up no end (unfortunately, we never managed to find time to travel on it). It turned out to be pretty straightforward to locate the new place, the Rakucho, and the place was absolutely excellent. We were paying the same amount as we had in Tokyo, but your money goes a lot further elsewhere, and what we had was palatial compared to our previous rooms. The accommodation consisted of a network of four or five interconnected rooms - a hall, a sitting room, and a couple of bedrooms for us to share. There was even the special "sacred area" that the guidebooks had told us we would find, plus a pretty little back garden.

Impressed, we set off to get a meal, and after briefly getting stuck in a shopping centre where the lifts didn't work and the escalators only went up, we found a fairly routine place where we could point at models of food in the window to get what we wanted. It started raining heavily as we prepared to leave, so the restaurant's owners generously gave us some umbrellas to take with us (we presumed that the etiquette was to bring them back the next day, and I think we did eventually, although I can't quite remember).

So we picked up some beers and watched Germany v Cameroon to finish the evening. The ref lost the plot amusingly, with a record number of bookings (16, I believe), but unfortunately Germany made it through in the end. After a couple of games of cards, it was time to retire : the next day was what we'd been looking forward to most. Day 17 >>