Observations from Osaka
· There is a really incredible amount of assistance for blind people. The main city streets of every place we’ve stopped have had ridged tiles to create pathways, and I’ve even seen maps in Braille and special stations to provide audio directions. And yet the number of blind people hasn’t been all that much greater than you’d expect.
· Chocolate covered yams. The fact that they exist here is just… special.
· Sitting here on the shinkansen, I’ve been somewhat distracted by the middle-aged man sitting across the aisle who’s been spending the ride flipping through porn. Nothing too hardcore, just nude photos, but it’s not like he’s trying to hide it either. Nobody else seemed the least bit fazed.
· I’ve developed a pretty low opinion of Japanese attempts at foreign food. One restaurant we tried, The Lockup, had cute-but-cheesy vampire/dungeon deco and served us omelettes and potatoes that were almost inedible. Another place served “French toast” that was perfect except for the lack of any egg in the toast. A third gave us “pad thai” that was also missing only one ingredient—the pad thai peanut sauce. I think if you want good international food, you’ve got to go five star.
· Hospitality here is really, really amazing. When we were in Arita, one of the galleries we stopped at had such amazing pieces that we had to buy something, so we picked out the most affordable ones we could find. The staff sat us down, showed us catalogs, served us coffee and Belgian chocolate, and then proposed to drive us to our next destination. When we went to a neighborhood post office in Fukuoka to ship those same ceramics, the postal worker spent at least 20 minutes and an inordinate amount of effort to help us package them up safely for shipping, in spite of the fact that they don’t offer packaging services. The next day, when we stopped in to use the ATM, he rushed out and presented us with cute little decorative charms as a gift. When we arrived at the train station in Osaka to go to Nara, the ticket-taker not only advised us on several options for the quickest trip, but later ran after us downstairs to tell us that an express train had just arrived by surprise. Likewise, when we wandered into a shrine near the landmark Shofukuji temple, a young man came out of nowhere to show us around and waited very patiently as we peered at all the beautiful religious ornaments and Anja did some praying. We thought we were on our way out the door, but then his mother invited us into a side room to serve us tea with delicious bean cakes. Every time we come into a restaurant, the entire staff welcomes us, and whenever we leave, they all bow and thank us for coming. When we were at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and Anja left her entry chit at a rest-area bench, someone grabbed it and ran after us to make sure we didn’t lose it. That pattern has been repeated a number of times—in Osaka, we would have lost a set of headphones and a CD player at the videogame arcade, except that someone put it in the lost-and-found for us to pick up the next day. We are constantly impressed.
· Osaka was described by the guidebook as an industrial city, but our local contact Yoshi insisted that it was the laid-back, Los-Angeles style counterpart to the businesslike Tokyo. I’ve noticed a great deal of alternative fashion, a great many interesting and beautiful modern buildings, a lot of customized cars, and a frustratingly frequent lack of downstairs escalators. I’m afraid to say that we started out with a rather negative impression of the place, thanks to a taxi driver at the shinkansen station who lost two of our three bags out the back of his trunk as he sped off in a hurry. (Needless to say, we switched cabs.) But we had a wonderful time that evening out at dinner and karaoke with Yoshi, and the following day we went to see an excellent traveling exhibit of Mucha’s art at a museum in town.
Going out in Fukuoka
Between the tourist literature that promoted the city as a getaway town and what we’d seen with our own eyes in the red-light district, it was pretty clear that Fukuoka was a good place for nightlife. The Let’s Go had a few ideas, and one sounded particularly interesting: Club Q’s. This place was set up to host 1,000 people at a shot and played a different kind of electronic music on every night of the week, from hard house to trance to hip-hop/reggae to para-para and “black music.” (Para-para, as Anja informed me, is a really fast sort of Japanese techno.) We happened to be in town for the “black music” night, which was a mysterious sort of label for music of any kind, but we figured it was probably just a geeky Harvard travel-writer’s way of describing dark/goth music. (Which would be absolutely perfect for Anja.) We set out to find the place, hopping on the subway for a couple stops to get to the shopping district, where we’d previously explored the huge underground mall. (Yeah, the one with enough fur to clothe every African on the savannah.) Our directions were very simple: “Three minutes’ walk north of [the shopping mall].” We were hoping that we were being given simple directions because the place was impossible to miss. We were wrong. We figured out north, took a walk, and found nothing remotely like a 1,000-person dance club. Thankfully there were a number of young party people out on the streets, and Anja’s Goth Lolita outfit won us instant popularity with a passel of girls who were on their way to karaoke. They did their very best to give us directions with what little English they had, and what guesses they could make about the location of our elusive Club Q’s, and we left them satisfied with the knowledge that we could at least meet up with them later and hear them sing to each other in Japanese. After canvassing the area a second time and extending our search in a few directions, and asking for directions from several sets of club kids who had never heard of Club Q’s, we finally ran into a couple of friendly young guys in big poofy jackets and baseball caps who told us that it had closed some time ago. Well, consider that mystery solved. Got any recommendations? we asked. Where are
you going? Turns out they were headed to a reggae party, and were happy to bring us along. A brief walk found us in front of the club, where these guys were given a warm welcome by a third of the crowd chilling outside. Upstairs we paid a $12.50 cover that included a drink, and joined a light crowd in a smallish smoky room listening to a DJ spin funky hip-hoppish reggae. That was around midnight. The lineup scrawled (in English!) on a whiteboard listed music playing til 6am, and sure enough, the crowd didn’t really arrive until about 1:30. That was when they had the main event: three consecutive hip-hop dance shows by local troupes, followed by a freestyling competition. The performers were spirited amateurs, and they were great fun to watch. We had to drag ourselves away after a few hours, in order to get some sleep.
“It’s fur time, it’s fun time!!”
One of Fukuoka’ distinctive features is an underground shopping mall, block upon block of shops connected to the subway station and also to several above-ground high-rise shopping complexes. The consumer experience is truly overwhelming. More overwhelming than the shops themselves—and the challenge of navigating the labyrinth between them—is the amount of fur being sold. Coming from San Francisco, I was already a bit shocked to see how many women sported fur on their collars, but it wasn’t until we hit Fukuoka that we could see how popular it is. At least three out of four shops had a decent stock of fur items: neck warmers, purses, coats, hats, you name it. Rabbit was the most popular, with a smattering of sheep and some that looked like it was from a deer. I’m not much
a fan of fur, but I’ve never really taken up the war cry against it. That changed when Anja gave me the background: while sheep pelts come from animals who are farmed in fairly humane conditions and whose bodies are used fairly efficiently, rabbits are skinned alive after being caught in the wild using inhumane traps that keep them in pain for days. Not a pretty thought. But the last straw came when we came across a shop window with a full-length fur coat on display. It had no sheep’s wool, and no rabbit. This coat was made entirely of big cats. Leopard, tiger, cougar, cheetah… patches of every endangered feline on the planet had been stitched together to form a patchwork rainbow of spots and stripes. Behind it was a photo of a Western model wearing a similar coat, with the slogan: “It’s fur time, it’s fun time!” It was all Anja could do to keep herself from throttling the salesman. We found out later, at another shop where Anja got a faux fur scarf, that Japan simply doesn’t enforce the UN laws governing fur. They speculated that much of it came from Germany, and seemed about as disturbed about the immorality of the act as a college student might be disturbed by the pirating of MP3s. It was just unbelievable.
Going out in Hiroshima
Anja and I were thirsting to check out the nightlife, and we’d seen how many people were out the previous night when we went looking for dinner. We went out exploring in the section of town conveniently marked on the map as the “club district,” hoping for some dance music but without any particular idea what we’d find. The people on the street were great fun to look at. One guy was dressed as an old-school Brit-punk, complete with a thick red mohawk, and hailed Anja as a fellow wearer-of-oddball-fashion. She got another smile out of a girl who was dressed in similar Goth Lolita style. We saw a ton of signs on the street for places with fanciful names that sounded a lot like bars or clubs, but they’d often be a few floors up and eight or ten to a building. When we went upstairs to take a look, they turned out to be itty bitty little bars that each had their own theme. You couldn’t pack more than 20 bodies into one of these places, with comfortable seating for six or eight, and they were invariably being used by clique or four or six people all drinking as a group. Often they’d be singing karaoke. I really didn’t want to intrude, and we both really wanted to find someplace to dance, so we kept looking. Walking further down the street, we were drawn upstairs again by a throbbing bassline, and zeroed in on a door. Five feet away, we could tell it was a solid electronic rhythm and looked at each other with a smile. Opening the door, the smiles turned into silly grins: we had just stumbled on a psytrance club. There was a little bar, a little lounge area and a little dancefloor with a light crowd. The DJs we heard over the next few hours were excellent, and we had a great time dancing. The crowd stayed light, so later on we went back to exploring the streets and poking our heads in other people’s parties in search a good bar. Eventually we found exactly what we were looking for: a “Sex Pistols” themed spot with four punkishly-dressed bartenders, two girls chatting with them at the bar, a karaoke machine and “Team America: World Police” playing on ten screens. Nobody there spoke much English, but they did their best, and we got a lot of laughs out of commenting on the movie. Three karaoke songs later, we called it a night and caught a taxi home.
Shabu-shabu with the DoCoMo office party
It took us a little while to find a decent place to eat, but when we finally rolled into a shabu-shabu spot, it was clearly a keeper. This one was do-it-yourself, with all kinds of meat and vegetable options available for quick boiling and dipping. A woman from the next table over saw that we didn’t really know what we were doing, so she demonstrated for us. (It takes six dips to cook the meat.) She was one of a big group of thirty- and forty-somethings, the rest of whom were men, all dressed in nice business clothes. We found out over the course of the evening that they all worked for NTT DoCoMo and were out to celebrate the holidays. (We later heard that what they were most likely celebrating was the end of the year, an occasion themed around erasing any bad memories of the past 12 months, which explains how much beer they were drinking.) One of them, they insisted, was a famous comedian with his own TV show. They brought out holiday gifts, and instead of a Yankee swap, they sang ‘Jingle Bells’ and passed them around the circle until the song was over. Except that they didn’t really know the words, so they sang the tune and we filled in the lyrics. Then the wrapping. One guy got a ski mask, and wore it for the rest of the meal. Another got a set of Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs. (Pointing at his crotch, his coworker looked at us and said, “Very big!”) Another guy got a sex toy. By our estimation, the woman must have already been feeling sexually harassed after her colleagues’ earlier jokes that she was “the geisha” and “the hostess.” But she grabbed the toy out of his hands and started making kissy faces at it, to everyone’s amusement. It was especially funny since I’d just taken the Monitor harassment training course before leaving, and this dinner would have violated all kinds of rules. According to another Japanese person that Anja met, they think of sexuality in a somewhat different way—there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s also not part of public life in social and business settings. Since your sexual identity isn’t part of what you present to your friends and coworkers, there’s no stigma against it, and you’re free to be whoever you want to be between the sheets. (Who knows how it actually pans out, but that’s the theory.) Ahh, to live in a country that
wasn’t founded by Puritans…
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Finishing up Tokyo
Observations.
· Tokyo was actually quite easy to get around, between generous help from strangers and the many signs printed in Roman characters.
· At the local convenience stores, they sell various meaty tidbits that sit in hot water, just like you’d pick up a hot dog down at the 7-11. But instead of a hot dog, you’ll often find six inches of octopus tentacle.
· Riding the train, Anja noticed that I was being stared at. My crime? Sitting with my legs far apart. Oops.
· Anja’s Goth-Lolita outfit has drawn countless stares. At least one head in three would turn as we were walking through the Tokyo subway station. At dinner one night, a man in his seventies spent almost his entire meal looking at her. When we were out at the restaurant last night, two young women stopped on their way to the bathroom, looked at her, and one laughed with her hand over her mouth. It’s hard to tell exactly what they’re thinking, but the reaction can’t be all negative. Some of the fashion we’ve seen on the street is
· Robes have been given to us as part of the room at both places we’ve stayed so far. Likewise, both rooms have had only one electrical outlet.
· Many ads feature Westerners, even when they’re selling Japanese products to Japanese people.
Homeless people. There are almost no homeless people, at least in the parts of the city that we saw. The few that we did see—two in the subway station, a couple on the street—weren’t asking for money. They didn’t have shopping carts full of stuff, they weren’t talking to themselves, they weren’t harassing anyone; instead they just looked dirty and tired and rather forlorn. (One that I saw later did have a small pile of possessions nearby, but he still wasn’t begging, just sitting on a piece of cardboard.)
The bridge at Harajuku. Haven’t heard of Harajuku? Take a look at some of the photos we took—it’s a truly unique place. Anja could tell you reams about it, since she’s been reading about it for years on the ‘net from various otaku. We got out of the train station, and we found ourselves on “the bridge” that she’d been hearing about for so long. With one lane in the center for cars and a broad promenade for foot traffic, it’s the designated place for Tokyo’s most outrageously costumed youth to strut their stuff. Some act out their favorite anime scenes in costume, while others hang out with their friends in outfits representing the latest trends in goth/punk/candy/fetish/godknowswhat fashion. I couldn’t always tell what they were going for, but it was highly creative. The best part was that Anja was dressed in similar style, and got to spend time making friends with the other costumed teens. In fact, she was so well-dressed that she ended up in countless tourists’ pictures as one of the Harajuku girls.
Seeing the Meiji-Jingu shrine. With Anja happily ensconced at the bridge, Mom and I decided to take a walk in the nearby park. An impressively tall wooden torii gate marked the entrance to a network of wide gravel paths that wound through a dense forest, creating a very pleasant place to stroll. We didn’t have any particular destination in mind, but we noticed a sign to the Meiji-Jingu Shrine that caught our interest. We walked through another torii at the entrance to the shrine area, where a sign notified us that these were the largest gates of their kind in all of Japan. When we arrived at the shrine, it was quite a sight. It was the same general design as the other shrines that we’d seen—and have seen since—but on scale that only the Emperor could afford. It was one of the only places we’d seen any other Western tourists. But this was not a kitschy, cutesified version of the city; the majority of the people there were Japanese who were coming to pay homage. One family had an adorable little baby girl in tow, and they taught her the prayer ritual as we watched. Just as we were about to leave, a grandiose wedding procession made its way across the central courtyard.
Shopping in Harajuku. After seeing the shrine, we collected Anja and set off to explore Harajuku. Anja had heard that there were some great little fashion boutiques in the area, so we got some general directions from a passerby and began our wandering. The place was teeming with people. On a major four-lane road, the sidewalks on both sides were packed shoulder to shoulder with pedestrians. These were some of the thickest crowds we encountered in the whole city. Over the past couple days, we’d noticed how everyone knew to walk on the left-hand side of the stairs, and how escalators obeyed a strict code of “stand on the left, pass on the right” and here it was obvious why that was necessary. One of our first stops was a chain called “Kiddie Land,” two stories of pure concentrated cuteness. The Japanese seem to have this sense of childish cuteness that you just don’t find elsewhere, and that was this store’s specialty. Picture a cartoon turnip, turned into products as diverse as keychains, purses, pencil cases and pillows. Each one with a different expression—this one’s happy, that one’s sad, a third’s angry and a fourth is looking bored. Mom and I both picked up towels with a pair of pig faces down the side. (Yeah, I know. You just have to see them to understand.) Then I ran into a bunch of umbrellas with handles fashioned as cartoon characters’ heads—including one bunch of cats that looked like they’d just gotten out of the kitty inane asylum. (Remember that in this country, cats are the symbol of good luck. What happens if the god of luck goes mad?) Later, we made a couple turns off the main avenue and found ourselves suddenly in the middle of an area packed with tiny boutiques. It reminded me of Barcelona, where the best shops are the little ones tucked away in the winding back alleys. Some of the fashions were interesting, others rather plain, and a few were downright bizarre—such as the “rock-a-billy” store where the mannequins sported cowboy hats, jackets with fringes, cowboy boots, all kinds of things with black-and-white cow spots, and meshback baseball caps with “TRUCK!” across the front. Many of the places we found imitated Western fashion, which was a pattern we noticed throughout the city; the Western look is apparently considered exotic and interesting. The prices were a bit high, but what you might expect for fashionable shops where the label’s name is valuable. Anja spotted one called Putamayo, which she’d been hearing about for awhile, and we found her some very stylish Gothic Lolita gear. Later we stopped in a shoe shop packed with all kinds of interesting designs, and Mom found a great little pair of shoes made specifically for that store, priced at a whopping $30. Finished with our browsing, we located a sushi boat restaurant and tucked in to some tasty octopus, ‘squilla’ (squid), surf clam, ivory shell clam, smoked eel and horse meat. (Yeah, you heard me. It was actually pretty good.) And for all those who insist that Japan is overly expensive, this restaurant was evidence that they just haven’t looked hard enough. At this and many other places, we ate satisfying meals of good quality food for $4-7 a head. After such a wonderful day, there was no question: we were going to come back to Tokyo a day early, and stay in Harajuku.
Karaoke. There was a karaoke place on the corner that we’d been using as a landmark since we arrived, and that night we went inside to check it out. Asian karaoke is set up in a completely different format from how it’s done in the States—instead of a bar where you line up to sing for the crowd, you and your friends get a private room with comfy seating and your own karaoke sound system where you can embarrass yourself repeatedly to those closest to you. They even bring you food and drink. We signed up for an hour, and ended up staying for three, singing everything from doo-wop to oldies to alternative to metal and J-rock. What an excellent arrangement.
Monitor Tokyo. One of my only connections in the country was the Tokyo office of the Monitor Group, and they were kind enough to take us to lunch. Finding the building was a bit of a challenge, since we set out in the wrong direction from the subway station. Thankfully, a helpful young woman walked up to us on the street while we were puzzling over the map. “Are you lost? I speak English!” she said, and within a couple minutes were off in the right direction. When we walked into the office, the first thing I noticed was that “Powerful Times” and “Looking Out for the Future” were displayed on the front desk alongside “Blur” and a few other Monitor thought leadership books. It made me proud, and reminded me almost painfully of home. The staff at the office were very kind, and a few of them spoke excellent English. I spoke briefly with the VP, an American who started out stateside and moved to Tokyo about five years ago, and he was willing to chat for a bit despite being in the middle of a busy end-of-year season. The office was quite a bit smaller than I’d expected for such a large city (about twenty-five people) but apparently they’ve been doing well for themselves and are hoping get a new office in the near future. Four of the staff took us out to a nice restaurant in the area, where we chatted about life in Tokyo and ate a fine meal centered around cold soba noodles. Two of them spoke excellent English, while the other two knew a few words. The group was tickled to hear about Anja’s interest in Harajuku fashion, and one of the young men assured us that karaoke has become a staple of the Japanese social scene.
Credit card trouble. We’d been planning on getting our first cash refill on the way out, which we’d been told would be easy to do at the international ATMs found in post offices and train stations. Well, just like the cell phones that turned out not to work, neither did our cash cards turn out to function quite as we’d expected. Under time pressure to move on to our next destination, it took Mom several cards and several PIN numbers to find a combination that would work, and at the end of it all we still didn’t know if we’d be able to get any more than $300 a day. It wasn’t until the next couple days that we would be able to get another card working, upping our daily limit to a very comfortable $700. Phew. When you’re traveling, there’s just nothing quite like the feeling that your cash flow might not exist.
The Studio Ghibli museum. Our next stop was another one that was near and dear to Anja’s heart: the museum dedicated to the works of Hiyao Miyazaki, creator of Studio Ghibli. Most of you have probably come across one or another of his films: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Ghost in the Shell were some of the more popular releases that made their way to the US. Studio Ghibli is to Japan as Disney is to America and the world. We had to get tickets, sold at a corner store automatic machine, which were (surprisingly) sold out for a couple days in advance. It was a long train ride out to the suburbs to get to the museum, and since we were almost half an hour late, we had no idea whether we would even make it. Thankfully the museum was open for an hour and a half after we arrived, with no time limit on how long we stayed, so we were free to enjoy it as we pleased. It was a perfect children’s playground. The whole building was custom-designed by Miyazaki himself, down the smallest detail. Unlike a regular museum, this one encouraged visitors to find their own way through, with all manner of curiously engineered passageways between the various rooms. We saw all kinds of interesting aspects of the animation process: examples models that the animators used to understand the motion of particularly complex scenes, materials that Miyazaki used as reference for , the light tables and pencils that the animators used to create keyframes, finalized character sketches to define how a figure would look from various angles, paintings to render the details of one scene or another, and finally a film segment using the characters from My Neighbor Totoro that was never released to the public. The whole place was intriguing. We picked up a number of neat little things from the gift shop, and headed back into town on the custom-painted Studio Ghibli city bus.
Meeting a gaijin punk. Coming back into the city on the train, I was staring at the subway map trying to figure out where to transfer when a white guy offered to help me out. He was wearing a black and red leather jacket, with electric-green Converse sneakers. Turns out he’s from Pittsburgh, he’s been living in Japan for a year and a half, been in Tokyo several months, hates the cold, loves the city, and has been hanging out playing music in the punk music scene. He’d taken Japanese in school, started out teaching English, and now that he’s in Tokyo he’s seen a lot of jobs for foreigners who can speak the language. It was reassuring to see that he’d carved out a place for himself—and was clearly having the time of his life.
Coffee in the taxicab. The next morning, the alarm went off at 4:30 this morning, a striking contrast to our usual leisurely pace. We’d read that the Tsukiji Fish Market was worth seeing, and it seemed worth it to getting up early since it was our last morning in the city. I layered up in every ounce of warm gear I had with me, and we headed out into the dark streets to pick up a (hot!) can of intensely caffeinated coffee and grab a subway. Except that the station was locked when we got there, and we realized that nowhere in our guidebook did it say what hours it ran. Flagging down one of the many available cabs, we managed to convey our destination to the cab driver with a certain amount of flipping through the phrasebook. He brought us to the front gate, just as we’d asked. As we’re getting out the cab, one of the cans of coffee spills on the floor, and it broke my heart to hear the noise that came out of the cabbie’s mouth when he saw the little pool of brown liquid on the floor of his precious passenger compartment. He almost cried. My mom did her best to clean up, but the man’s eyes showed nothing but pain and sadness. He wouldn’t take the extra money she wanted to give him, but she left it anyways, since there wasn’t anything else we could do. I was kind of blown away—here’s a cabbie in one of the world’s largest, densest metro areas, and he had not a harsh word in his head. The cabs here are noticeably nicer than anywhere else I’ve been, complete with little lacey doilies on the headrests, and given the Japanese obsession with cleanliness, it’s probably pretty important for a cabbie to keep his vehicle clean. (Mom later recalled hearing that if you’re drunk and end up vomiting in a Tokyo taxi, it could cost you hundreds of dollars to pay for the cleanup.)
The fish market. Putting the whole embarrassing issue behind us, we started our do-it-yourself tour of the market. Our first impression was of the traffic making its way through narrow passageways, which was dominated by men steering these little three-wheeled motorized carts to carry boxes of food from place to place. They would drive at breakneck speed, constantly threatening to run into one thing or another but always steering expertly away at the last minute. (I saw one use its bumper only once.) Every now and then, we’d spot someone using an ancient two-wheeled hand-cart to carry a similar load. I could hardly believe that visitors were allowed in such a place, since it seemed like a recipe for horrendous lawsuits, but we were basically ignored as we dodged our way through the carts and started gawking at the wares available for sale. The first area we passed through was the produce section. A high warehouse ceiling covered a densely-packed city of ad-hoc storefronts, where hundreds of small teams had staked out a ten-by-ten area to sell boxloads of goods. Bundles of four-foot daikon radishes, great bags of bean sprouts, crates of cabbages and many completely unidentifiable vegetables were being sold at a fast clip to customers who presumably represented various Tokyo restaurants. It felt dirty, chaotic and perfectly efficient. The organization of the place had a whiff of Burning Man ad-hocracy, but the people had a professional intensity that you just don’t find out in the desert. They acted like stock traders who just happened to be inconvenienced by the need to physically move their goods with each sale. The most incredible thing was to be so close to them as they went about their work, seeing the action close at hand. We saw a live octopus tossed into a bucket as it was trying to escape from a tabletop, watched as wholesale five-foot-long flash-frozen tuna were auctioned off to the middlemen, stared at flat fish with two eyes on the same side of their head, saw a bandsaw used to cut a frozen tuna down the spine, and observed the prodigious quantity of blood spilled in the process of preparing the seafood for market. Afterwards, we wandered through the alleys where the workers bought their tools, and squeezed into a tiny restaurant to order a hot steaming bowl of noodles. It was one of the tastiest meals we’d eaten to date.
The first batch of photos are up on Flickr. There's a lot, and they're a bit out of order, and they're very lo-res -- just ask if you want the full 6-megapixel version :)
Initial thoughts
San Francisco to Narita. The ten hours I spent in the air were quite possibly the best I’ve ever spent on an international flight. United served us food that was more palatable than any other airline barring Air France (who really impressed me with wine, cheese & fresh baguettes) and more of it than anyone. They didn’t even charge us for it. We watched Ice Age (rather cute and funny) and The Island (you gotta love sci-fi, even when it’s bad). I had a vague ambition of taking that time to teach myself the katakana, but that disappeared in favor of practicing phrases and getting started on “The Tale of Murasaki”—a wonderful piece of historical fiction about the woman who wrote the world’s first novel, the Tale of Genji. The hours flew by. One of them disappeared altogether, since we arrived a full hour ahead of schedule.
Disembarking. We all cheered when the plane hit the ground. Anja was irrepressibly excited. Walking through Narita Airport, we were all on the hunt for hints of Japan, and we found plenty: moving walkways that stopped moving when nobody was on them, giant TV screens in the waiting areas, men hired specifically for the task of welcoming you to the downstairs escalator (I’m not kidding), intelligent baggage carousels that laid bags in a neat little row (and still had a white-gloved assistant to perfect the job), adorably uniformed women working the service counters… and the fashion. Within five minutes of leaving the plane, I could already tell that I was in a world where the way you composed your appearance mattered about ten times what it does in the States. Not even New York can compare for the sheer quantity of stylish attire that these people wear. London and Barcelona were better than New York, but they’ve got nothing on Tokyo. I hardly understand most of it—only Anja could even begin tell you why they wear what they do, and what it stands for. But there’s a clearly a language to their clothing, and it’s spoken with great fluency.
Arriving in the city. We took a “limousine bus” into the city, which roughly translates as “airporter.” The views out the window started out pretty normal: a toll-road expressway with lots of energy-efficient cars like station wagons and minivans, a few interchanges here and there, some industrial areas and office buildings… and then came the city. Oh. My. God. For comparison, I’m trying to think through the other big cities I’ve been to: New York, London, Mexico City, Tel Aviv. Montreal. They’ve all got roughly the same profile, just variations on a shared theme: low-lying buildings for most of the area, surrounding a concentrated zone packed with skyscrapers. The low-lying buildings are usually no more than four stories or so, and the big aesthetic question as you approach is whether there are any skyscrapers that actually justify their prominent position in the skyline. The answer is usually yes, for one or two, but no more. Mexico City was probably the least impressive of all those I listed, since the city center itself is mostly populated by four-story buildings. Well, as we got into the urban area, it was clear that Tokyo was an entirely different story. Same theme, perhaps, but magnified at least three times. Instead of four or five-story outlying buildings, Tokyo’s are fifteen or twenty. Each takes up about half a block. We went through a sea of them, gawking, occasionally craning our necks to check out one or another whose architect really earned his keep. None were run down. 90% had external stairways, which was kind of odd. Mostly very functional, but built in such impossible numbers—in the course of fifteen minutes’ drive, I think I saw more physically engineered human space than exists in the entire lovely city of San Francisco.
Walking the streets. There was a bit of a distance to cover between the airporter and our intended ryokan, so we got an immediate first taste of Tokyo street navigation. First lesson: while some ads are in English, as are many store signs, forget trying to figure out the street signs. It’s just impossible. Second lesson: don’t get depressed about the first lesson, or worried in the least about losing your way, because Tokyoites are helpful beyond belief. We asked a policeman in broken Japanese whether we were on the right street, and he happily confirmed it for us. We later asked two random girls whether we’d passed our turn, and they fussed over us with what little English they had for easily twice as long as was necessary, making extra sure that we knew exactly where to go. (I’ve since heard that some people will even take you where you need to go, just so you get there safely.) We made it to our ryokan, got checked in, realized that what counts as a room for three is what an American would call a walk-in closet, and took off for more streetwalking. Third lesson: small streets that are lit up like Christmas trees with lights and signs and flashing neon are, in fact, for four things—cheap eats, pachinko parlors, porn and love hotels. Oh, and Yakuza: I spotted a rather distinctive looking young man wearing long hair that sort of exploded out from his head, a black suit, white shirt and no tie; Anja informed me that this was fairly standard thugwear. I found myself curiously unable to fear the guy, since to me he looked like just another twentysomething out with his friends for a good night on the town. (Just… a little overdressed.) After sampling a pachinko parlor full of cigarette smoke and overwhelmingly chaotic noise, we decided to go for the cheap eats. There were no end of places to choose from, so we found one with a pictorial menu and made our way upstairs. We tried to order green tea, but the waiter did his best to explain that they only had Chinese tea. Confused, we accepted the offer, and it was only a few minutes later that it dawned on us that we’d found the single restaurant in the district serving Chinese food. The meal was delicious, entirely different from anything I’d eaten stateside, and cost about half again as much as I would have expected to pay at home. In other words: just as I expected.
Losing seventeen hours. My laptop hasn’t quite caught on to the local time, and it’s actually quite helpful to know that my body is still clinging to the belief that it’s 10:47AM on Friday. I’m sure it’ll come around. After all, it’s not a fair fight: my stubborn circadian rhythm versus all of Tokyo trying to convince it that it is in fact Saturday morning at 3:47AM. (My circadian took its first punch from the fact that we didn’t crawl into bed until 6:30AM PST.) When I woke up, I had the unmistakable feeling that there was no way in the world that I was going to get back to sleep—the same feeling I’ve had many times after going out dancing til dawn, only to be reminded that I’m entirely without the ability to sleep far beyond my usual wakeup time. God knows how long it’ll take to adjust entirely, but since today holds a solid 20 hours of wakefulness in store, I’m sure my rhythms will succumb to the shock therapy sooner rather than later.
Random observations. Cold coffee with a Starbucks-like logo, called Mt. Rainier. Coffee right next to it called Maxim. Pornographic manga right by the entrance of the corner store. A panoply of mysterious vitamin and herb-packed energy drinks that we daren’t sample. Engrish everywhere, some of it just hilarious. An establishment called “Violence.” (Not quite clear what kind of service they were selling.) Finding a sign with psychedelic swirly colors that was, in fact, a head shop that carried fliers for techno parties. No garbage cans anywhere. No homeless people anywhere. Many, many bicycles. Almost as many motorcycles. No open space.
Background
Tomorrow afternoon, I'll be taking off for Tokyo to kick off three and a half weeks of travel around the Japan. At my side will be my little sister Anja and our mom Judy.
A little bit of background: this trip is a kind of congratulatory present to Anja, who recently finished high school and is now about to step out into life as a college student and a San Francisco citydweller. She's long been interested in Japan: she wears clothing fit for
Harajuku, draws manga graphics, has an encyclopedic knowledge of anime, studied Japanese enough to hold a conversation and even managed to pick up calligraphy. Thanks to my generous mother, Anja is now about to see the object of her fascination first-hand. I've had a passing interest in Japan myself, thanks to some childhood training in Aikido, occasional anime marathons in high school and college, and the fact that I've spent a good part of the last year at work digging up facts on their neighbors China and Russia. I don't know that my mom has any specific connection to the country. It's so foreign that neither of us would have picked it as a destination on our own, but the chance to explore it with a somewhat-informed guide is a wonderful opportunity.
I'll be posting my thoughts here as we travel, and also the photos that I'll be occasionally dumping into my
Flickr account. Inspirational credit goes to my colleague Jenny Johnston, who put together a marvellously interesting account of her trip to Ghana under the flag of
Lobster Harmonica. I don't know exactly what kind of 'net access we'll have while we're moving around, but I have a feeling it won't be hard to find WiFi. After all, this is the country known for inventing nifty new cellphone gadgets and pioneering the use of e-cash. I'm just hoping that Tokyo is just as futuristic as
William Gibson and
Neal Stephenson make it out to be. If not, I'll be having some words with them when I get back...
