Japan
May/June  2008

back to James writings and travelogues

This is part one (of five): May 18 to 21, 2008
part one   part two   part three   part four   part five  

All text and photos ©2008 James A. Teitelbaum
All rights reserved.
Revision 1.2

Introduction:

I spent a lot of 2006 and a bit of 2007 flying all over the place for my gigs with Gary Sinise, and I generated a lot of frequent flyer miles in the process. So the big question was: how can I use these miles in a really cool way? Whittling them down with small trips here and I there seemd to be a waste; I’d rather use them to take a really great trip to a place where the airfare would normally be painfully or prohibitively expensive. I have always wanted to go to Japan.... Booked it in February. It cost 65,000 American Airlines frequent flier miles for a nonstop flight. An extraordinary amount of preparation was required for this trip. I did a lot of research: what to see, what to do, where to stay. The culture, the language, the people. Transportation, money, weather. I spent hours on the internet booking hotel rooms in several different cities, sight unseen, making educated guesses about how good the locations were.  I bought a Japan Rail pass ($268) at a travel agency (these passes are not available on-line or on Japanese shores), for use on a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. A teller at my bank had swapped me $893.56 for ¥89,000, which works out neatly - a yen is now about a penny (not long ago it was 1.3 penny), so at the moment ¥100 is more or less $1. So you just move the decimal over and you basically have the price: ¥2000 is about $20.00. This made figuring out how much I was paying for things rather easy, even if things are now a third more expensive than in the recent past. Thank you, falling dollar! By the morning of the trip, my turtles were at my pal Kim’s house, I had performed my mandatory ritual pre-travel house cleaning to an obsessive degree, and I had finished most of the perishable food in my fridge (which made for a few interesting meal combinations during my last two days at home). My favorite Gal Friday Night, cocktail tester, monkey wrangler, and photo assistant - the world-famous International Rebecca - would be joining me halfway through the trip, but for the first half, I was on my own. Basically. Three friends were waiting for me in Japan, but two of them were people I’d never met before (such is life in the 21st century). There was Sandy, a pal from growing up in Ohio in the 1980s. I was also due to meet Reiko and Emi, two Tokyo natives. I’d met one of them via an introduction from a mutual friend in Chicago, and the other was someone I’d struck up an acquaintanceship with on-line while trolling around for information during trip planning.

Also, while in Tokyo, I would be working on two magazine articles: one of them for Tiki Magazine, and the other about high-end cocktail bars.  So, I had a to-do list in both of these categories.  Other than the "horribly unpleasant" obligation to visit a few more bars than I might normally hit, I had nineteen days free to explore as much of Japan as possible.


Sunday, May 18

Got up about 8:30am, and was out of the house by 9:15.
I parked my car at Studio Chicago, a recording studio where I do recording sessions and teach classes. Al, the owner of the place, was nice enough to let me park there after my previous parking arrangements fell through at the 11th hour.
Thanks, Al!

From there I (just barely) caught the Fullerton bus to the Blue Line train, and rode the train most of the way to O’Hare airport. The tracks were being worked on from Cumberland to Rosemont - the first and second stop away from O’Hare - so everyone had to get off of the train, board a bus, travel one stop, and then get back on the train. Then we rode the train one stop to O’Hare. I do not know why the bus just didn’t go the two stops straight to O’Hare. The CTA has never made much sense, so why begin to now?  At least I was prepared for this madness, due to some sharp research by International Rebecca (see, I told you she was a kick-ass Gal Friday Night!).

I arrived at O’Hare by 11:00am, and was due to be in the air by 12:50pm. There was a slight delay, because the airplane’s log book had been snagged by the maintenance crew, who had to use to it report a scratch on the fuselage. It took 45 minutes to do this, but when we finally got in the air, the flight was smooth, if long. It took twelve and a half hours to get to Tokyo Narita airport, during which time I occupied myself by trying to sleep (not much luck), watching There Will Be Blood, playing endless games of Tetris, and gazing out the window at the fascinating landscape of Alaska. The flight plan described an arc that took us over Canada and Alaska, and then skirted a few miles off the coast of Russia, and finally down to Japan. The frozen areas of northern Canada made for an amazing view.
When it was too cloudy to look outside, I played with the little television screens built into the seat backs. They all have touch screens, and passengers can choose from a dozen different movies on demand, plus music and video games (the game controller is stored in the arm rest of the seat). Pretty cool, but there was only one interesting movie the whole way there (and none on the flight home).
My seatmate was the tallest teenage kid in Japan (he must have been a whopping five foot nine), and also the chubbiest. He was sneezing without covering his mouth, picking his zits, and blowing ultra-stinky farts the whole trip. I thought of him as “Booger-san”. He did not say one word to me the whole flight.

We were chasing the daylight the whole trip, moving west, following the sun. So, even though it was 1:30am (Chicago time) when we landed, it had been daylight the whole trip. I had to stop thinking about the time, however, since it was 3:35pm - the next afternoon! - upon my arrival in Tokyo.


Monday, May 19

3:35pm.

I got off of the airplane at Tokyo Narita airport, and prepared myself for a profound culture shock. It turns out that Narita looks exactly like every other airport in the world, except for that I could not read two-thirds of the signs. This actually came as a relief, since I feared that I’d be able to decipher even less than that. I can get by on icons and every third bit of text... even if the people writing this text are clearly not used to English.  That the Japanese are willing to learn English (and are even enthusiastic about it) is wonderful (for me anyway), but Asian attempts at the mother tongue are often mangled in hilarious if endearing ways.  Instances of “Engrish” presented themselves to me almost immediately.  I stopped keeping track of them after about an hour, as the novelty wore off due to a constant bombardment of new examples. The Japanese attitude towards English is very pragmatic. They understand that Japanese is spoken in Japan, and nowhere else. They acknowledge that for good or ill, English is the most practical language to learn, since you can more or less get through most of Europe, the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere with it. I was told that all kids learn to read and write in English but few can speak it. That is a more specialized skill, apparently. Lets also get this out of the way right now: at six foot four (193 cm), I really am a giant here, towering over just about everyone in this country. But: my immediate impression, which did not change much, is that these people really are friendly, polite, well-dressed, and healthy. I made my way to the Japan Rail (henceforth JR) office and exchanged a voucher (given to me by that travel agency in Chicago) for my for JR pass, meant for use on my side-trip to Kyoto and Nara from May 29 to June 4. At the same office, I got a Suica & N’EX card package (¥3500) for more immediate use.  JR and Tokyo Subway are two different systems.  JR runs along with the separate Tokyo subway system in the city, but JR also all covers the rest of Japan. The Suica card would be used to get around on the Tokyo subway and on in-city Tokyo JR trains between now and my departure for Kyoto, and the N’EX is a one-time discount pass for a JR express train from Narita airport to downtown Tokyo. I’d researched this ahead of time, and it is a good deal to buy them together like this. It is available to tourists only. You even get a reserved seat on the train from Narita to Tokyo (usually more expensive), as opposed to sitting in a less comfortable non-reserved car.

The train ride took about an hour (the non-N’EX rides into town take over 90 minutes - Narita airport is really, really far from downtown Tokyo!), which I passed staring out the window at the rice paddies flashing by. Rice is planted everywhere in Japan. The moment one leaves the heart of Tokyo, rice is inevitable. People on the outskirts of the big city convert their yards into rice paddies, and patches of land in suburbs that might otherwise be parking lots or retail space is taken up by rice paddies flanked with an apartment building on one side, a paved commercial road on the other, and some shops on another. No space is wasted in Japan, especially so close to Tokyo, and if there is a half-acre somewhere that isn’t being used for something more important, someone floods it and uses it to grow rice.
The train was not a shinkansen (bullet train) but it was still hauling ass.  Since the train was running express, it sped past certain stations.  It did not even slow down.  The normally almost-silent train suddenly thundered as it raced through non-express stations at dizzying speed.  When the train was not going through stations or past backyard rice paddies, we went through forests of intense green.  It is wet here, and things grow.

A girl pushed a snack cart up and down the aisles of the train car.  When she got to the end of the train car, she turned around and bowed to the riders before moving to the next car.  She had a cute little uniform on; this was the first of many uniforms I saw in Japan. The people here are all about uniforms, and for the most part the uniforms are designed a little bit better than what I am used to seeing. Most of the people in Japan look good in their uniforms, rather than uncomfortable and embarrassed. The workers all keep their uniforms clean and pressed, even the trashmen and construction workers.
At Tokyo Station - one of several major rail hubs in central Tokyo (Shibuya and Shinjuku are a few other important ones), I transferred onto the subway, rode a bit, changed to a second subway train, and finally made it to station C06, Akasaka, which is walking distance from my hotel.
The subways in Tokyo are super-easy to use. There are a lot of rail lines, and looking at a subway map, it is even more tangled than the Tube in London, the Metro in Paris, or the Subway in New York.  But, each line has a letter (in romanjii, or Western characters) that identifies it, and each stop has a number. Additionally, on each side of each of the platforms in the stations, there are signs that tell you which stops are in which direction. So if you were at station C06 (station 6 on the Chiyoda line), there would be a sign on one side of the tracks saying “to C01 - C05” and a sign on the opposite side saying “to C07-C20”. So as long as you know your destination stop number, you can’t get lost.
The station names are also printed in romanjii as well as in Japanese.

rice paddies seen from the air

So, to date, I have ridden:
a car
a bus
a train
another bus
another train
an airplane
a big train
a small train
another small train
...to get to where I am.
I had crossed fourteen time zones, the international date line, and the Pacific ocean.
Now it was time to walk, and don’t ya’ know it, this is where I finally got a bit lost.  I got turned around looking for the hotel, but as the sun finally set on this very long day, I stumbled around the neighborhood of Akasaka, and even began to get a little nervous that something very bad was afoot. I found the remains of a building that had been demolished.
Was this the remains of my hotel?
Had I been scammed by some shady web site into making a reservation at a condemned hotel?
I stopped on a street corner and asked two kindly-looking middle-aged women for directions. I didn’t speak their language, but I did have a map handy. I showed them the map, smiled, pointed at the icon for the hotel, and busted out one of my few broken Japanese phrases: “doko-ka, kudasai” (“doko” means “where”, “ka” is sort of a verbal question mark, and “kudasai” means “please”).
First rule of travel: memorize “please” and “thank you” first and foremost.
One of the women motioned for her to follow me to the corner, about two doors down the street, and then pointed at a building about three doors down a small perpendicular road. It was right there! I’d passed it three times! D’oh!

So, a word about maps in Japan: mandatory.
Most of the streets in Tokyo do not have names.
At all.
Every single business in this city of twelve million people has published a map showing how to get to their place.  It will be on their web site, their business cards, and it is tattooed on the owner’s children. (Hey kids: pick which one of the three of these examples I am kidding about.  Hint: Japanese people still think tattoos are for criminals). In fact, I had a sheaf of documents with me containing print-outs of maps for all of the places I thought I might want to visit, all pulled from the internet.

Greater Tokyo is divided into cities, which are divided into named wards. Each of these regions is subdivided into even smaller regions, called chomes, which are sometimes named and always numbered.
A typical Tokyo address might read 1-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku. Chiyoda-ku is both the city and the ward. Marunouchi is the district. Marunouchi is broken down into chome, here 1-chome (not named in this case). Number 7 refers to the block. Since each block has an individual number, addresses on one side of the street have a different middle number than on the other side. The last number, in this case 2, refers to the actual building. Building 1 may not be next to building 2 since they were assigned numbers as they were constructed, not according to location.
Almost all addresses also contain something like 2F, 3F, 4F (2nd floor, 3rd floor, 4th floor).

This is what we colloquially refer to as a complete cluster fuck.

Most of the subway stops are named after the ku (major central stops), ward, or (sometimes) chome that they stop at. There are maps near every subway stop, and this city would crash without them. The maps are drawn and oriented according to the direction they are actually facing when posted on the street, which is very cool and shows an excellent and typically Japanese attention to detail.

I made it to the Weekly Mansion Akasaka (2-17-54, Akasaka, Minato-ku) by 7:00pm local time. I was asked to pay for all nine nights of my intended stay, in full, upon arrival (¥70,470 - or about $80 per night) without even having seen the room (I’d be moving on after night nine, the halfway point in this trip).
In general the place was fine for the price. Perhaps the term “mansion” is an overstatement, but the tiny room (there is no other size in Japan) had a comfortable bed, a mini-fridge, a hotplate, a tiny desk, a tiny loveseat, and a really powerful shower. I mean a “knock you back three feet” sort of powerful shower.  Kick ass.  Now, all I could ask for was that it be a quiet room. For the most part, it was. The hallway was sort of cold and industrial, but the room was fine... even if there were some burns on the carpet, and even if there were food stains on the ceiling and high up on two opposite walls. I wondered about those all week. How did they get there?  There was no other explanation other than a food fight that had been cleaned up without the usual Japanese attention to detail.  Food on the ceiling and at the tops of two walls. The stains were all the same orange-red color, and there were only trace amounts, just enough to notice, but still, it was on the ceiling and two walls. That is evidence of a large gastronomical catastrophe in the recent or distant past.
The air conditioner had a remote control with an insane amount of buttons, and they were all labeled in Japanese. A bit of tinkering and guessing, and I got it working.
Trial and error, observation and perseverance.

And now the hard part: in order to defeat jetlag, I would have to stay up until my normal bed time. Although I’d been awake and traveling for twenty-eight hours, I was riding on adrenaline and excitement now, so staying up for a few more hours would not be a problem. After a powerful shower that blasted the sweat, grime, and travel fatigue right off of my body, I headed for Hibiya, an area within Ginza.
Ginza is a super-expensive and ultra ritzy part of Tokyo.  But it is also the home of the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan. I had read this: “Located above Hibiya Station exit A2, fantastic place for visiting foreigners involved with any sort of media. Started after World War II as a place for visiting journalists to find a bed, a desk and a place to file stories. They’ve lost the beds, but serve food, drinks, Internet, and often fascinating speeches on Japanese culture. Complementary guest memberships give you access to a giant English-language library about Japan, newspapers, magazines from around the world. Guest should represent yourself as somehow being associated with the media. Bar is a great place to get context for Japan, talking to journalists who process Japan for the outside world. You can’t buy drinks here without being some form of a member.”
This seemed like a good place to get started with my Japan adventure.
Maybe it would be a sort of home base.
Also, Ginza is not far from Akasaka, so the trip would be mercifully short - I’d traveled enough today.

Just after coming up from the subway station, I discovered a kaitenzushiya, or a sushi restaurant where little plates of food cruise by the customers on a conveyor belt that snakes around the curved sushi bar. You grab what you want right off of the belt as it floats by. When you are done, the waitress counts up your plates and presents the bill. Plates are color-coded to indicate various prices. There is a hot water spigot by each seat for self-serve tea. It wasn’t long before some nice looking bits of fish passed before my hungry eyes, and they were soon at the bottom of my even hungrier stomach. For ¥1330, I got six plates of sushi, or twelve pieces, and it was pretty good. Not the best ever, but fresh and more than fine for a little over one dollar a piece.

Wandering around, looking for the Foreign Correspondent's Club (with no success), I came across six vending machines set into a little alcove on the ground floor of a huge office building. I can’t quite call the alcove a shop. More like an indentation into the building. Three of the machines sold beer, one sold cigarettes, and two sold soft drinks. An older man, ostensibly the owner of the place, had some snacks for sale on a little cart. His customers stood around in a cluster, smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of beer from the vending machines. It is legal to drink booze on the streets in Japan, but it is considered uncouth to drink any beverage or eat any food (or even smoke) while walking. People stop moving to eat or drink, often at vending machines. They’ll stand there to consume their snacks and then move on. There really are thousands of vending machines in Japan. Vending machines are everywhere, selling everything.

I was now going on hour thirty of my day, it was drizzling rain a bit, and I wanted a beer - a very rare thing for me these days. A ¥500 coin got me a large can of Asahi and ¥170 in change. It wasn’t very good beer, but it hit the spot. Before long, two American guys named Chris and Ross and a well-dressed fellow from an unidentified southeastern European nation were trying to tell me how to get where I was going. They were friends with two drunken Japanese businessmen in blue suits who were very happy to meet me. Drunken Japanese businessmen in blue suits are an icon in Japan. Another uniform, really. After office hours, they are everywhere. They are always friendly. Japanese are happy drunks.
I was ready to depart the smoky little cave of coin-fueled commerce, when a drunken Japanese hipster (no blue suit) started handing out beers to all of the aforementioned people. He was wasted. The Americans tried to refuse the drinks (apparently our benefactor had been buying rounds out of the machine for a while now), but they eventually relented and drank. Then the guy gave me a tiny little packet from the snack cart containing a miniature beef jerky. It was the size of a cigarette, and a small one at that. I sort of had to eat it.  It was waxy and without flavor.
I thanked him for it.
In Japanese.
Sorta.
This little corner of Ginza - the beer alcove and the sushi restaurant - are absolutely not typical of Ginza. I happened upon the only block of this ward that isn’t triple-priced and snooty. Good deal.  But I still had a mission to accomplish. Following the directions I had been given by my new pals, I looked for the Foreign Correspondent's Club within a complex dominated by a Seibu department store (part of a big chain) and a mega-multiplex movie theater. No luck.

I wandered down a small, narrow, random street, full of tiny shops and restaurants with red paper lanterns hanging above the doors (called izakaya). Reaching the other end of the lane and arriving at a larger street, I noticed, purely by chance, one of the things on my magazine article to-do list, the Imperial Hotel, home of the Old Imperial Bar.
My notes said: ”Designed in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright and preserved from the original Imperial Hotel. They have signature drinks that capture the essence of Japan.  (Imperial Hotel Tokyo, Main Bld. MF, 1-1, Uchisaiwai-cho, 1-chome, Chiyoda-ku)”.
How about that address?
So one last time: this place is in the Tokyo sub-city of Chiyoda, the neighborhood (within Chiyoda) of Uchisaiwai-cho, and then chome number 1 (within Uchisaiwai-cho), and then block 1 within chome 1, and then building 1 on block 1. Main building, main floor (MF).
Fucking hell.
But this one was easy, since the large hotel was the only building on the block.

I went into the hotel, and found the lounge. It was elegant and upscale (of course, since it is near - but no longer strictly within - Ginza). At the door, under a very cool vintage drawing of the bar it says: “Anyone with the distinctly exotic experience of having visited the Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial will tell you the very name stirs up delicious art deco images of glamour and intrigue. Relax amidst the ambience of this remarkable legend over sandwiches and frothy beer, or try a Mt. Fuji, a 1924 Imperial original”.

Inside, I discovered that the Frank Lloyd Wright elements are fairly minimal. Bartenders are all in tuxes, and there is a nice selection of interesting liquors and liqueurs behind the bar. Being Japan, there is a great selection of whiskeys.  Japanese people love their whiskey.  The bar is very low, I almost felt like my chair was but a stool. There is a very well-defined spotlight shining on the bar top in front of each seat. Bar snacks are a little crystal chalice of salted peanuts and some other type of bar snack that I cannot identify.
I ordered a drink, the Mt. Fuji: gin, cream, orange juice, pineapple juice, and something else (¥1365, or a few yen more than my whole dinner). I wasn’t super impressed with it, and like everything else in Japan, it was rather tiny.  My next round, an equally diminutive Sidecar, had some ice chips in the glass, but it is made with real lemon juice and is served in a glass with a cool checkerboard pattern etched around the rim.

To my left were a couple having an intimate conversation, and to my right were two drunken Japanese businessmen in blue suits. Before my first drink was gone, the suits wanted to be my best friends, and were buying round two for me (the Sidecar).  These guys were like sixty years old and ran big corporations. They would have never given me the time of day at home.  They are the opposite sort of person from me - I have absolutely no interest in the world of big business and don’t normally mix well with people that do. But here in this bar, 6000 miles from home, those sorts of social and economic barriers melt away.
There are very, very few non-Japanese people in Japan. If you leave the major tourism areas like Roppongi and Shinjuku, you might go a whole day not seeing any people who aren’t Japanese. So, these two businessmen did not care that I am twenty-some years younger than them, that I work in the music biz rather in the world of high finance, or that I only know about twenty words in their language; they were curious about who I was and why I was in their country (in a very friendly and welcoming way).
One of them had pure white hair and was as thin as can be. He looked like a mummy. He didn’t know much English, but kept asking me if I was a “moo-shan”. I think he meant “musician”. The other guy was a little younger, not quite so skeletal in build, had mostly black hair, looked a lot healthier, and was by far the more conversational, friendly, and outgoing of the two.
He was wasted.
He was telling me that he was a diplomat who had worked for the Japanese government in London (10 years), Iran (4 years), Palo Alto California, and Vancouver. I believed him. He insisted that I call him up socially every time I come to Japan. He was turning 62 the following week, but he looked 45, tops.
I do not think that anyone in his social, economic, or age class has ever been so friendly to me, unless they were motivated by either business reasons, or by being a friend or a relative or something. This guy had no ulterior motive: he was just a drunken Japanese businessman in a blue suit, and it is their way to be friendly. Both his given name and family name ended in the syllable “-aki”, so he insisted that I call him Aki. He pulled out a business card, and a pen, and circled both instances of “-aki” to make sure I got the point.
In Japan, it is sort of a ritual among honored peers to exchange name cards (as they call them). I had come prepared with a stack of my business cards (as we call them). I gave him mine in return.
He was very pleased.
We are now officially friends!
Or colleagues.
Or something.
Exchanging name cards in Japan is like adding someone to your MySpace friends - you might barely know them, and never talk to them, but it is an acknowledgement that you like or respect them on some level and are willing to accept them into your life in some superficial way.
“Moo-shan” the mummy started up with a cigar. It stank.

I had now put away four drinks tonight, plus I’d been awake for way too many hours, and it was finally getting close to the time when I could allow myself to go to sleep. I excused myself and headed back to Akasaka.

Walking to the train, I saw a statue of Gojira (Godzilla!) in a park.
On the train, two teenage Japanese girls were sitting next to me, organizing a little scrap book and giggling like mad.

I stopped at an all-night grocery store near the hotel (FoodeXpress), and discovered that all of the fresh foods are half price after 11:00pm. While making notes on the price of Japanese food and marveling at all of the curious things that I could not identify, I saw a woman in a kimono with her hair all done up. Not a geisha, I later learned, but just a lady in traditional costume. You see a little bit of that, maybe a few people a day. Most people in Tokyo dress more or less Western-style, except they make more of an effort to look good. No one goes out in flip flops or cutoffs. I like it. But anyway, seeing a lady in a kimono in a grocery store at a quarter to midnight is kind of cool.

I got a giant bottle of water, two big pieces of asparagus wrapped in thin slices of raw beef, a huge shrimp covered in some sort of batter, some bananas, and the biggest apple I have ever seen in my life (it was the size of a grapefruit!) for ¥754.
Saving the fruit for breakfast, I ate the rest of the snacks, explored the neighborhood a little (noting a rose garden and a jazz club within a block of  "home"), and then took 6mg of melatonin and some vitamins.
I slept like the dead.
What a day!


Tuesday, May 20

Got out of the hotel by 10:00am.

Took the subway over to Nakameguro, the first stop on the Hibiya line (H01). I was told to: “spend a day to wander east from Nakameguro through Daikanyama (lots of clothes shops, cool cafés, stylized second-hand book shops, and record shops) to Ebisu and then north to Shibuya”. It seemed as though wandering all day through quieter parts of town and then ending up in a bustling area with lots of places to eat (Shibuya) might be a good idea. It was a bit windy and cloudy in the morning as I wandered around one of Tokyo’s least-busy and least-touristy neighborhoods. I took a picture of a pretty canal, and saw a funny book store (part of a chain) called Book Off. What are they thinking?  Found a vintage clothing store called Cider. I cannot believe the prices they charge here for classic threads. The cost must be 500% higher than at home. Someone told me to fill a suitcase with vintage clothes and then sell it here.  I was told that it could pay for my trip. I suspected some hyperbole from the person who told me this, but now I am convinced as to the truth of it.  Should have done it.  All you need is a contact in advance, someone who owns a shop who can tell you what sort of stuff is hot in Japan right now, and who will at least agree to look over whatever you bring.  There is cash to be made.  Next door to Cider is a teeny little shop that appears to carry nothing but vintage airline memorabilia.  Pan-Am, baby. Everything in Japan has a little cartoon mascot to represent it. I saw thousands of them. Took pictures of a few at random, but what I captured was but a small sampling. Animal mascots as cartoons are fairly common, but having run out of obvious animals like cats and dogs and horses, I saw animal cartoon mascots in the shape of badgers, otters, camels, and polar bears. The funniest ones, however, are people. Ate lunch at the corner of two streets that actually have names: Komazowa-dori (“dori” = “street”) and Ebisu Menami. Couldn’t tell you the name of the place. All Japanese. The restaurant was a common sort of quick eatery. There is a selection of surprisingly life-like fake (plastic) food in the window of the restaurant. Most of the fake food actually looks pretty good. Each dish has a number next to it. You go into the restaurant, and there is a vending machine. You put some money in, and press a numbered button that corresponds to the number of the dish you may have selected in the window outside. The machine gives you a coupon. Then you go to the counter, and give the cook your coupon. He makes your food for you.

For ¥490 I got a bowlful of hot noodles in broth with seaweed on top, and a bowl full of rice topped with some sort of mystery meat and a sprinkle of magenta colored shredded and pickled vegetables. Pickled vegetables are huge in Japan. Almost every meal I ate came with a little side dish of pickles (sort of the equivalent of a cup of coleslaw in the West), and I believe that the pickles were from a different source vegetable every single time. I could not identify any of them, but I ate all of them and never regretted it. Anyway, for under five bucks, this was a good lunch, and certainly better than anything I could have been served at home for this price.

This became a rather happy trend. People always talk about how expensive Tokyo is, and given that Tokyo is one of what are considered the four most important cities of the world (along with London, Paris, and New York) this should come as no surprise.  But I found that eating in Tokyo is not necessarily expensive, and the food is rarely bad.  I was able to track down decent and affordable meals almost everywhere I went. I am sure that there are places where one can drop a few ten-thousand yen notes (a few hundred bucks) on a gourmet dinner, but I was able to eat satisfactorily on less money than I might have spent if eating out twice a day at home, and the food was of a much better quality than at home.  The price-to-quality ratio for food in Japan is great.  What kind of lunch could I have bought for under $5 in Chicago (or any American city)?  A fast food burger?  Sorry, I haven’t had a single one of those since the early 1990s.  A sloppy burrito?  Good once in a while, and rarely under $5 anymore.  Certainly nothing prepared fresh in a restaurant environment.
Good food for cheap in Tokyo!
Also, tax is included in the listed price, so you always know what you’re paying, and there is no tipping. So ¥490 is ¥490.

As I walked over to Ebisu, I saw a boulangerie (French bakery). Struck me as a little funny; my previous trip was to Paris. Turns out that even though the Japanese eat almost no bread (I don’t think I was served any, at all, the whole time I was in Japan), they do have a penchant for French bakeries - especially in Kyoto (next week!).

I didn’t really see much of incredible interest on my walk so far today. Maybe it was good to have chosen a sleepy part of town, so as to get oriented and ease into life in Tokyo. There is a photography museum in Ebisu that I didn’t happen to walk by, but I came back to it later in the week.

After a bit of a hike (as the day grew less drizzly but considerably hotter), I found myself in Shibuya.
My understanding of the area was: “more subdued than Shinjuku and less cosmopolitan than Roppongi, Shibuya is a trendy shopping district that caters to a young and upscale crowd, bustling throngs of students and young office workers with its many shops and thriving nightlife, including more than a dozen department stores. Quite a bit hipper than Ginza, large number of restaurants, bars, and theaters. Shibuya Crossing Japan's busiest intersection, with its hordes of pedestrians, neon, and five video billboards that have earned it the nickname 'The Times Square of Tokyo’. Tower Records in Shibuya used to be the largest record store in the world”.
I suppose this is more or less accurate, although (as you will read later) I wouldn’t call Roppongi "cosmopolitan".

Shibuya Crossing is indeed a sight to behold.
Just outside of one of the biggest train stations in the city, there is an intersection where several streets come together. There are towers full of shops and restaurants all around, and there are a half dozen huge department stores in the area. The street itself is pretty wide, and you do not want to cross against your light. No one steps off the curb, or waits to cross while standing a step or two into the street. There are thousands of people, slowly accruing on the sidewalk, patiently waiting for the next crossing. Critical mass is eventually reached, and eventually the opposing street corners can hold no more people.
And then, the light changes.
All of the motor traffic lights turn red, in every direction, and thousands of people cross the street. The crosswalks even run diagonally. Masses of people, lined up on either side of the street like historical armies preparing for war in some period film, have waited patiently for the light, and now they march towards each other.  The two tribes stride purposefully into the battle zone, and clash mid-street. Rather than poking each other with lances and bayonnettes, the opposing forces thread through each other, dodging shopping bags and briefcases while avoiding endless bicycles (which have their own crosswalk lane normally, but in Shibuya Crossing, it all falls apart). They pass through and around each other, all landing on the opposite corner from whence they came. After a minute it is all over, and the street corners and the criss-cross of crosswalks are empty. Motor traffic resumes as one or two people immediately begin to linger on the corner, the first few cells in what will soon accrete into another massive organism waiting for the next light.
Shibuya Crossing is the most famous crossing, but some of the other big neighborhoods, like nearby Shinjuku, have similar crossings. In fact, it seems like a neighborhood in Tokyo is not taken seriously unless they have a big crossing. All the cool kids have a crossing, you know.

Wandering around bustling Shibuya, I noted the vertical nature of Tokyo.
I found the massive Tower Records, and like all other large businesses, it is eight stories tall, but each floor takes up a relatively small footprint. In America or even Europe, this would be a two or three story shop, but wider, rather than taller.
There is no room here to put all of the commerce on the ground floor of buildings, as is the case almost everywhere else in the world. Many of the best shops, restaurants, bars, etc., are on the second, third, fourth, fifth floors of buildings. But they can’t make the structures too tall, because of frequent earthquakes. Walking down a street looking for interesting things, one always has to remember not only to look at what exists at street level, but to also look up. Signs run horizontally above shops on every street, as expected, but on each building, a vertical sign poking out of the facade indicates what is to be found on upper levels. Climb the stairs, take the elevator - exploring Tokyo means getting up off of the ground a little bit.

I had walked a great deal today, and my feet were starting to hurt.  It was mid-afternoon.  It was hot!
My last stop before dinner was Yoyogi Koen Park.
This is a large park a bit north of Shibuya, in Harajuku, on the way towards Shinjuku. It is pleasant enough, with some ponds, fountains, lots of trees, many huge and fearless crows, and (supposedly) free loaner bicycles. I didn’t take advantage of that last bit because the bike rental area was on the opposite side of the large park from where I entered, and I was just too walked out and overheated to hike over there. So, I took off my shoes near a pond, and watched the people and birds and a fountain for a while, drinking a bottle of water (from a vending machine, natch).

The breeze off of the water and the shoelessness did wonders for me, and before long, I was ready for more.  I left the park to check out the adjacent Meiji Jingu Shrine.  Looking at a map, Meiji Jingu and Yoyogi Koen are one big plot of land. But on the ground they are divided, and they must be accessed from separate entrances. For future reference, the entrance to Meiji Jingu is steps away from the Harajuku subway stop, and the entrance to Yoyogi is a very short walk from there.

There are hundreds of shrines and temples in Japan. If you are visiting, you will definitely see a bunch of them. Some are tiny and some of them are massive. Some are very impressive, and others are rather pedestrian. Meiji Jingu Shrine is one of the best in or near Tokyo, and is more of a public park than it is purely a temple or shrine complex. Meiji Jingu was created in 1920 as a tribute to Emperor Meiji, who brought Japan into the modern world in 1868, ending the nation’s 680 years of feudalism, isolation, and military rule. He died in 1912. The grounds consist of three areas: “Naien, or the inner precinct, centered on the shrine buildings; Gaien, or the outer precinct, which includes the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (a collection of 80 large murals illustrating events in the lives of a former Emperor and his consort), plus sports facilities, and the Meiji Memorial Hall. These areas are covered by an evergreen forest of 120,000 trees of 365 different species, which were donated by people from all parts of Japan”.
 As a bonus you can visit the emperor’s favorite horse, which is now stuffed.

The museums keep rather limited hours (I missed them), but walking the extensive grounds is well worth doing. A huge wooden torii gate marks the entrance to a dusky path through a dense forest. The area is sometimes very quiet, since the trees and the soft path absorb a lot of sound, but like all other urban oases, the delicate sounds of birds and the gentle sound of the breeze through the trees is shattered by trains going by just outside of the park, and helicopters going by overhead.  After passing a huge display of about 180 ancient and ornately decorated sake casks on one side of the path, and an array of more recent European wine barrels on the other, the path splits to the left to get to the actual temple and shrine, or go straight ahead to get to the museum.

I suppose it is time for a primer to visiting worship sites.
You’ve got your temples, and you’ve got your shrines.
Some places have both.
Temples tend to be large complexes of several buildings, while shrines are smaller affairs.
One or many shrines may be included within the temple complex. You will always pass through at least one (and as many as one hundred) of Japan’s iconic torii when entering the vicinity of a Shinto shrine. The entrance gate to a temple will be even bigger and more elaborate than even the biggest torii, and is usually flanked by a pair of big deity statues.
Near a shrine, there will usually be a fountain equipped with little bamboo cups with long handles. These are for washing your hands, and sometimes for drinking. Do not drink unless a sign says it is all right to - some of the water is not fit for imbibing.  Do wash your hands before going inside.  Hope for a sunny day so that your mitts will dry quickly in the sunshine.  No towels!  Near the shrine, you will find a big box with a slatted grill on top, always right in front of the actual enclosure containing the religious artifacts.  It looks like a barbecue.  Throw a coin into the box, bow twice, clap your hands twice to get the attention of the gods, bow again, and then say your prayer. Usually there is a fat rope there too; you can pull it to ring a bell if your clapping is not sufficient.
There is also usually a big central plaza on the temple grounds, plus there may be statues, and many shrines will have ancient stone incense burners, a few have pagodas on the premises (five-story are the most prestigious but rare).  Many temples have gardens, paths lined with great stone lanterns are common, a few have colorful collections of sake casks, some complexes are UNESCO Word Heritage Sites, some of the bigger ones charge admission to the actual temple (but not usually to just walk the grounds), and all of the big ones will be overrun with tourists.
So will the medium-sized ones.
And the small ones.

There also may be a big bulletin board type of thing with little five-sided slabs of balsa wood (about the size of an index card), tied to it.  The shrine will sell you one of these wooden planks (prayer boards) for about ¥500.  On one side there will be a printed image, an icon unique to each shrine.  The other side is blank.  Write your prayers or wishes on the blank side, and tie it to the board with a little piece of string threaded through the top.  Most of the big shrines have hundreds of these things hanging up, and it is fascinating to (carefully and respectfully) read what people have written on them (about 5% are in languages other than Japanese, and of those only a handful are in English).  Many of the shrines have themes, or in other words, they are constructed for certain dieties.  So there is one shrine for wishing for luck in business, another for wishing for love, and another for wishing for health.  Et cetera.  Often the design on the prayer board reflects this.  The images printed on the flip side are often beautiful, and towards the end of my trip, I decided to collect a few as souvenirs. The monks do not appear to be offended by this.  Each shrine has its own design. I grabbed about a half dozen during my last few days in Japan.  Occasionally, you will see larger ones for as much as ¥2000, and a few times I saw them for as little as ¥400, but ¥500 seems to be the going rate.

There is another ritual seen at a few temples, during which a hexagonal metal cylinder that is filled with chopsticks is shaken up. Eventually one of the chopsticks slides out of a little pinhole at one end of the cylinder.  The stick will have a symbol printed on it.  A nearby series of drawers, like in an old library card-catalogue, will have symbols on the front of the drawers.  The person shaking the cylinder matches the stick symbol to a drawer symbol, and pulls open the drawer.  Inside are papers with fortunes printed on them.  If you like your fortune, you keep it, and if not, you fold it into a strip and tie it to a nearby tree.  Near any shrine you will see a tree that has folded up papers tied all over it.  This ritual will usually cost you about ¥100.  Sometimes the fortune is in English, Chinese, and Japanese on the same page, and sometimes in Japanese only. Sometimes you can pull the drawer yourself, but sometimes a shrine worker will look at your stick and pull your fortune paper for you.

Casks at Meiji Jingu

Relaxed and energized after a walk in a lovely forest, it was time to head back over to Shibuya to meet my pal Emi (pronounced “Amy”). We were to meet in the lobby of a large hotel, just because she deemed it a convenient and easy spot to find. It was a little strange meeting up with someone who I had only known via email, but this is the modern age and this is how friends are made in the 21st century. I was grateful for the chance to spend some time with a native, and to get an insider’s perspective on everything that was going on around me.
I had a longish list of bars and restaurants that I needed to visit for the pair of magazine articles I was working on, so we thought we’d go over to a place called Sun Aloha in Shibuya. We looked for it for a while, with no luck.  Emi called the restaurant, and discovered that it had closed up, permanently.
At that point, I was all for finding any random place to get some dinner, but Emi mentioned that she preferred Shinjuku over Shibuya.  By chance, another place on my list was in that part of town. So we went to a place called Tiki Tiki in Shinjuku.  If you’re interested in what we discovered at Tiki Tiki, see the summer 2008 issue of Tiki Magazine.

Emi’s command of English was much better than my Japanese (that said, my Japanese couldn’t be any worse), and she was kind enough to speak English all evening.  The occasional pictogram drawn on a bit of scrap paper helped to build her vocabulary and to get my points across, and I occasionally whipped out the Japanese phrase book that International Rebecca had thoughtfully sent me away with.

When making international friends, avoid irony, steer clear of puns, never use metaphor, and always select your jokes carefully.

After dinner we went for sake. Emi selected a little restaurant named Mihachi with a bar that must have had at least ten seats - a large bar for Japan!
I liked looking at all of the sake bottles lined up behind the bar. The label designs are so great. Bars and shops all over Japan like to line their sake bottles up for display inside or outside, or in a window, and a good display they make.

I had learned a little bit about sake before I came to Japan:
“...most common is clear sake, divided into three main grades: daiginjo or tokkyu (premium), ginjo or ikkyu (first grade), and junmai or nikkyu (second grade). Junmai is typically a heavier, fuller sake, while the ginjo sakes are lighter, drier and more delicate of flavor and fragrance. Sake is also classified by taste, as amakuchi ("sweet mouth") and karakuchi ("dry mouth"). The ginjo sakes tend towards karakuchi, and the junmai sakes tend towards amakuchi.  Premium daiginjo sakes are usually served cold”.

I wanted a high quality dry sake. So I got a daiginjo. The brand name was Dewazakura (pronounced: day-wa-za-kooo-rah). It was good. I seem to remember a second round following it, and I think the bartender let me sample tastes of a few different types before I made my selection.  I was always under the impression that sake was to be served warm, but room temperature seems to be the currently preferred way of enjoying Japan’s national beverage.
My sake was served in a little ceramic pitcher with a tiny matching ceramic cup. I also got a ceramic bowl containing a cube of something that resembled a cross between tofu and light cheese. On top of it was a cashew, two smaller nuts, and a tiny speck of wasabi.

Did I mention yet that my policy towards food in Japan is: if I cannot identify it, I must therefore go out of my way to eat it? I ate a whole lot of things in the land of the rising sun that I absolutely could not even classify as animal, vegetable, or mineral. Or for that matter, I didn’t even know if some of them were person, place, or thing. The two most questionable delicacies were both fed to me by Emi. Tonight, she ordered a bowl of ika. Ika is squid. I have had calamari before, and I like tako, which is sushi or sashimi made of rather pretty purple, maroon, and white octopus tentacles, but this ika was something else entirely.
Baby squids, whole, not processed, not seasoned, not cut or otherwise prepared in any way.
A bowlful of them.
Right from the sea and into this little ceramic bowl, completely intact.
Maybe three inches long, and maybe six or eight of them neatly laid out for inspection.
I did not hesitate.
These were freaking bar snacks, and I have never turned down a bar snack.
Manipulating my chopsticks like a native (or so I thought - except for that I am left handed and used my chopsticks that way, which, as I learned after arriving home, made me seem to be essentiality a retard with no manners or hygiene), I plucked a lil’ squiddly diddly from the bowl and bravely popped it into my mouth.
Hmmmmm....
Fishy.
Salty.
Rubbery.
So far so good.
Crunch.
Crunch?
What part of a baby squid goes “crunch”?
Just one - the little tiny speck-sized black eyeball.
It did not give a satisfying pop like a yummy salmon egg served up over rice, it was a hard crunchy crunch, like a little piece of coal or something.

Emi only ate one.
I wondered if she was seeing how far I would take this.
Before my second pot of sake was gone, I had polished off the school of squid.
About eight of them.
Bring it.

Emi and I parted company, and I wandered around Shinjuku a little bit.
This part of the city goes all night with younger kids in (or barely out of) their teens roaming the streets looking for adventure. There aren’t a lot of bars here, but the retail stays open late, there are pachinko parlors everywhere, and there are miles of neon lights in every possible color.

After arriving back in Chicago, a few people asked me if Tokyo looked like the street scenes in the movie Blade Runner -- a curious question since that film took place in Los Angeles.  And yet, it makes sense. Somehow, Ridley Scott’s vision of L.A. in 2019 does seem a bit Asian-influenced, and if there is one part of Tokyo that looks like Blade Runner, it might be Shinjuku after dark on a rainy night.

I made it back to Akasaka well before midnight.
I must pace myself!


Wednesday, May 21

Today I made for the opposite side of town from yesterday, finding myself in Ueno, in the northeast corner of Tokyo. Ueno is known as being a place that retains what the Japanese call the city's shitamachi atmosphere, or the feeling of old Edo (Edo became Tokyo after Emperor Meiji reformed the nation and opened Japan to international trade in 1868).

Right off of the train, I stumbled into the huge Ameya Yokocho (or Ameyoko) bazaar that runs between Ueno and Okachimachi. It is a spirited food and flea market, which is spread underneath the JR Yamanote train tracks, selling everything from cheap clothes and accessories to fish and seafood. I didn’t spend a lot of time in there, because I was eager to get to Ueno park, the entrance of which is right across the street from the train station and the bazaar.

I bought a bottle of orange juice and a boxed lunch from a convenience store (¥566).  My lunch was five rice clusters (like sushi without the fish, but with seasoning on top), half an egg, a dollop of potato salad, and a few breaded things.  Things.  They were good things.  I love that convenience stores (or kombini in Japanese) are more or less like the ones in North America, except for that you can get some non-disgusting, non-sucky, fresh food at the ones in Japan. I am not talking about a gourmet meal here, but you can get something worth eating for ¥500, as opposed to the month-old factory processed hot dogs and the 100% artificial microwave burritos that 7-11 stores in the West pass off as "food".   This is so Japanese.  They understand the concept of a convenience store, but they do not understand the concept of shitty food.  More power to 'em, I say! (By the way "kombini" comes from "convenience").

I ate my food at a little plaza by a big pond near the entrance to the park, opposite some sort of bummy guys drinking beer across from me, and two girls playing traditional Japanese music over to my right.  The wind was blowing my trash away, and I had to keep chasing it down.
Japan is so clean. People really take pride in their country here, and litter is almost non-existent. Letting so much as a chopstick wrapper get away from me would have branded me as a heel here - although I would have been equally diligent about keeping my trash together at home. One must set an example, after all, as futile as it seems at times.  Speaking of setting an example, the Japanese government has a recycling program that seems rather efficient. All public trash cans are labeled with icons for glass, plastic, paper or other. There is always a plastic recycling container near a cluster of vending machines. Remember that people don’t walk with their food, drink, or smokes. So after buying a drink, they drink it, and then they can immediately recycle the bottle. Nice.

About Ueno park: “The city’s largest park, Ueno-keno Park is home to the zoo, the Tokyo National Museum, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Science Museum, and Shitamachi History Museum, and numerous shrines, cultural and historical points of interest. It is also home to Tokyo's homeless population, and is most crowded on Sundays”.
I did not intend to see all of this today, but I wanted to knock out one museum, maybe a few shrines, and generally walk around and enjoy the green space. This park truly is very large, and is a must-visit when in Tokyo.  I didn’t see any homeless people (they are all across town in Shinjuku as far as I saw).

The afternoon was very hot and very sunny. I came across a group of people watching some acrobats. A man and a woman performed amazing feats of strength, poise, and balance, as they struck odd physical poses that required them to support each other’s bodies in rather unlikely ways. Then, an impossibly cute girl got up on a tall unicycle and began flipping little bowls from her foot onto her head. After some of her more difficult maneuvers, she looked more surprised at her having pulled the stunts off than the audience did.  When she finally smiled and raised her hands in a triumphant flourish, the audience applauded; whether they were applauding for the stunt or her smile is open for debate. I was a fan of both.

The women in the park were all carrying parasols to protect themselves from the sun. The past two days had been rainy, so umbrellas had abounded, and today’s sunshine required only a very small change in accouterments to protect the locals from the elements.
Most large office buildings, museums, and even restaurants have big umbrella-locking facilities outside. You stick the handle of your umbrella into a clamp and then turn a key 90 degrees. The key is released, and the umbrella is locked. Some of these big racks hold hundreds of umbrellas. The Japanese are all about their umbrellas or parasols, and with good reason - one or the other is needed almost every day, it seems.

I looked into the Museum of Western Art (¥420), and found that half of it was closed for a renovation or expansion or something. Based on a picture I spied on a map, the new expansion (due to open in 2009) will almost triple the gallery space. The existing museum isn’t super-impressive, with only a few dozen works on display. Everything up until the fifteenth century is represented by only a handful of pieces, and the next three centuries are a bit sparse as well. Getting into almost-modernism, things pick up a bit: the collection is heavy on nineteenth century works, culminating in a lot of secondary works by the usual Impressionist superstars (of whom I am not a fan). I guess the closed area goes into the twentieth century, but I wasn't able to find out.
I was shocked to find a Renoir that I liked - this does not usually happen - Parisiennes in Algerian Costume from 1878.  Renoir was not really known for his Orientalist works (an oft-derided genre that I am unashamedly a fan of), but he should have done more of them.
Contrasting this were some decidedly inferior works, such as a rendition of The Last Supper by Marten DeVos (um, who?). The figures are poorly rendered, and they all look like they are eating White Castle buns filled with chicken salad. There are some areas on the painting where you can see that the artist painted over his mistakes or poorly reworked areas. It is just a second-rate attempt.
Having planned to spend three hours or so in the museum, and having wandered through the galleries rather slowly, I was surprised to find myself in and out of there in an hour.

Leaving the museum, I wandered past some tents that looked like they were being prepped for something (this is called foreshadowing). I took a picture of a fountain, and I wandered through a torii gate down a long wooded path. Along this path were a hundred ancient mossy stone lanterns leading up to Tosho-gu shrine.
The giant lanterns date from 1651, and were built in honor of Tokugawa Ieyasu by his grandson Iemitsu. They are about eight feet tall, and are covered in moss. I read some text stating that the ones inside the shrine are made of copper, but I think the ones along the path leading to the shrine are stone. Even the copper ones are blue-green-grey with age and are quite mossy. These lanterns are really cool, but the shrine itself was underwhelming compared to others.

I saw a tree with some big and ripe-looking oranges all over it. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of picking fruit in a shrine, but the tree was technically in another part of the park - its branches dipped over a wall into the shrine area. I reached up and selected two nice looking fruits and walked back out of the shrine.

Note the oranges!

A wide tree-lined promenade is the central boulevard in Ueno park, and I sat myself down on a stone bench in the shade. It was very hot in the sun, but very cool in the shade. The difference was startling. Watching all of the people walking by, I leisurely pulled the skin off of one of the oranges.
The peel came off easily. Inside, the fruit was juicy, with big robust sections of orange begging to be feasted upon. I popped a section into my thirsty mouth, and was quite surprised to discover that it was completely sour, with a bitter aftertaste.
Not orangey at all. More like a rotten grapefruit.
I discreetly tossed one and seven-eighths of my remaining snack into the bushes.

The nasty bitter taste would not leave my mouth. Nearby, a bunch of kids were gathered around a candy cart. I towered over them as I bought a bottle of water and a box of Toppo (¥300 total). Toppo are like little tube-shaped cookies, about the length and thickness of a drinking straw.
Inside, they are filled with chocolate.
I am not much for sweets made in a factory, but this was just what I needed.
They did the trick.

An unassuming staircase in a corner of the park lead down a wooded hill, and then through a few dozen bright red-orange torii gates. I found myself at the Hanazono Inari shrine. Multiple torii are a trademark of the Inari sect of Shinto, emphasizing the kami (spirits) of fertility, rice, agriculture, foxes, industry, and worldly success.
Right next to it is the Gojo shrine. Very nice.
I think my next stop was a wrong turn: I followed a sign to an "old tomb". A small hill had three staircases going up the sides, like three points of a triangle converging in the center.  At the top, a few old men sat on benches smoking. There were no signs, markers, statues, or any other indicators that this "old tomb" was anything but a dirt hill with some guys stinking it up on top.  I went back down.

I was due to meet my potential friend Reiko for dinner, so I had to leave the park. My map indicated that the Ueno station for the JR Yamanote line (the big circle rail line around central Tokyo) was right outside of the park, in the same complex as the subway that I had arrived on (remember that the subway and the JR are different transport systems, but sometimes share stations). One stop down the line from Ueno is a stop called Uguisudani.
For no apparent reason, I decided to walk to that stop instead, just to see what I could see.

My notes said that: “north of Ueno lies Yanaka, an old fashioned district with a delightful residential area of traditional old homes, neighborhood shops, and temples; several of Tokyo's most affordable Japanese-style inns are located here”. I may or may not have walked through this area on the way to the train, but what I did see were some traditional-style Japanese homes, and then a fascinating cemetery, and then a long residential street with cars lined up along the curb. This last bit is a fairly common site wherever you go in the world, but in this case, almost all of the cars had guys sleeping in them. Not bums, not cab drivers. Regular middle class fellas, all sacked out in their rides. Lots of them. Weird. Speaking of the cars in Japan, need I tell you all that there are virtually no pickup trucks, SUVs, Humvees, or other such jackassery in Japan?  What I did see are a lot of small, efficient cars, and truly endless quantities of bicycles. I like this place. The cemetery was interesting in that there do not appear to be any graves here.  This is one of the many parts of this culture that I had to figure out for myself using the clues at hand, and a little common sense.  I am sure that there is plenty that I could have read on the subject, and I did do a lot of research on Japan before going there, but one can’t absorb everything ahead of time.  I read up on the things that I thought would be most useful to me, and let’s face it: when one travels abroad, one hopes that the local burial customs will not be something that the traveler will have to become an expert on. So, I had to piece it together as I observed it. The cemetery here consists of marble memorial markers, not so unlike a Western gravestone, but bigger and more elaborate.  Not quite so elaborate, however, as a sepulcher. Somewhere between the two. An altar, more than anything. Behind it is a sort of bin in which people place tall wooden sticks with (presumably) prayers written on them. The sticks are about six feet tall, three inches wide, and are flat, but with notches cut into the sides every six or eight inches. The wind was gently shifting the clusters of planks around, resulting in a gentle click clacking sound that I failed to get on my tape recorder (I tried). I did capture the sound of the ubiquitous crows that cannot be avoided in Japan.  There are also offerings of things like tea or incense in front of the altar.  The footprint of the structure is much too small for anyone to be buried under it, so the assumption here is that these markers contain the ashes of one or more family members, not unlike mini mausoleums. Japan is much too small for everyone to have their own full sized, Western-style grave site.

Parked outside of the cemetery were dozens of taxis. This cemetery is in a residential neighborhood, and there is no large boulevard, no commerce, and no major pedestrian traffic in the area. I was the only person on foot for blocks in any direction. But many, many cabs were lined up, waiting for a fare. Or, perhaps, they were all dropping people off at their final destination. Cabbing it to the boneyard. Last ride. These cabs are all going on one way trips. All of them were immaculately clean, by the way. Beaters and jalopies are another thing that you don’t see in Japan.

Over a big bridge that traversed the JR train tracks, I came across a relatively grubby area with a lot of hotels, many with colorful names. Some of these were probably the infamous "love hotels", where you pay by the hour. Overnight guests are allowed, but cannot check in until 11:00pm or so.

Train ride to...
Ikebukuro: the town at the northwestern corner of the JR Yamanote line, and one of the largest hubs of activity in that part of Tokyo. I waited on the train platform, as instructed, for Reiko. She is a very cool girl who composes musical scores for theater, and who also works as a product tester for Yamaha keyboards. Having used my share of Yamaha products over the past 25 years, I was rather impressed to meet someone who gets to mess around with the prototypes and then tell the designers what works and what doesn’t. Sign me up. Reiko also owns condos in both Germany and Japan, drives a sports car, and owns a horse. Her English isn’t quite as good as Emi’s, but we managed to have a good time anyway.
As always, I was grateful for her effort.

We went to a coffee shop called Toa, which like all businesses in Japan, has a funny little cartoon mascot.  In this case, a Mexican bandito with a big sombrero. Toa is right across the street from the Ikebukuro station, but don’t expect to find it: like everything else in Tokyo, you either have to know where it is, own a map, or just get lucky and stumble across it.  Reiko did not understand the word "cartoon", so I had to explain it by pointing out every cartoon mascot we walked past that night... and there are a lot of them.
Inside, Toa feels more old European than Mexican, similar to places I have visited in Spain, England, or France during the past decade. Reiko had coffee and a lot of cigarettes; I had tea - the first caffeine that I have had in several months.
The Japanese people love to give gifts. I had been told this, but I did not realize how true it was until I got there.  Reiko brought me a little box of German chocolates from her most recent trip to Germany, and a lovely postcard showing the amazing castle Neuschwanstein set into a verdant green valley. Made me want to visit Germany even more than I already do. Germany is definitely making its way towards the top of my destination list, and rather quickly.

Six Famous Views of Cartoon Mascots of Japan.

We wandered around Ikebukuro for a bit. The JR station divides the area in half; you need to walk through an underground tunnel decorated with a mosaic undersea scene (or pass through the massive train station) to get from one side of Ikebukuro to the other. The west side is more adult, with upscale dining and electronics shops. The east side is the young part of town, with hip kids running all over the place, having a good time and doing their thing. Fewer bars, no beer in the vending machines, more fashion stores, more arcades. Even the blue suit guys seem younger here.  Reiko pointed out the Sunshine City Building, one of Japan's tallest skyscrapers, and home to a huge indoor shopping center and aquarium. We didn’t go in (“it is for teenage girls”), but we did wander into and then out of a nine-story book store.  I keep forgetting that I am illiterate in this country. My addiction to buying books ought to be curbed here, but it is hard to fight the habit.

We eventually found our way to a tempura restaurant called Hageten (probably) on the 11th floor of the Tobu shopping center (department store). Many delicious restaurants in Japan are to be found within department stores, this is not at all unusual.
When we sat down, we got a little bowl with three kinds of pickled vegetables in it.  Then sashimi came out, very nice cuts of salmon, octopus, and tuna, followed by miso soup and a big bowl of sticky rice. Then they brought us each a little teacup full of something that was sort of a whipped egg white (but with more flavor than egg), served hot, with a mushroom slice on top.  Like a hot pudding.  At the bottom of the cup was a surprise: a little shrimp.
Then the tempura came: pumpkin, eel, whitefish, shrimp, a crab claw, asparagus, and finally a basket with a big cluster-ball of clam, shrimp, maybe some egg, just a big delicious fried mess.  It was all amazing.  De-freaking-licious!
I did not want this meal to end.

Next, we made it to Bar King Rum, a destination on the to-do list for one of the two magazine articles I am working on this week (Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, 2-9-1 Oota Bldg. 1F).
Unusually, it is on the ground floor. This bar is tiny (no surprise), very dark, and a little grubby.
Anyway, Bar King Rum is where rums go to die.
What a selection!
The bartender - who was wearing the shirt from an American Boy Scout uniform - didn’t speak any English, but Reiko sorta-kinda managed to tell him that I am a writer and was interested in meeting the owner for a chat. Turns out that the owner would be in three hours later. I couldn’t see myself being able to afford to sit at this bar for that long - drinks were in the ¥1700 range - so, gazing at the rum collection, I picked my jaw up off of the bar and got to the business of placing an order.
If you want rum in Tokyo, this is the place to go.  But: they will charge you ¥500 per person just to sit your ass on a stool (they call it a "table charge" - although there are no tables). This fee does not go to the DJ, band, or anyone else but the owner (there is no DJ, band, etc.), it is just a tax on your decision to patronize this bar instead of one of the thousands of others in Tokyo. You’re welcome. You will also be charged tax on your bill after the table charge is added.
Ouch.
My bill was ¥5150 for one cocktail, two tastes of local Japanese rums, and two ginger ales for Reiko.
Ouch.

Random neon in Ikebukuro

Reiko headed home.
On my own in Ikebukuro, I decided to walk around a bit before jumping the train back to Akasaka.
Japan is known as a conformist society, and this has its good points and bad points. People here obey the law, they keep their land clean, and they are courteous to each other.  There is little political dissension.  People seem content in their lot, whatever it may be.  However, in most areas, the idea of free expression is not part of the vocabulary.  The same part of the Japanese upbringing that keeps them polite, also keeps them from being individuals. Walking around Ikebukuro, one can see all of the various social subcultures here - freaks, nerds, sluts, yuppies - but compared to what I am used to, the freaks aren’t as freaky, the nerds aren’t as nerdy, the sluts aren’t as slutty, and the yuppies aren’t as annoying.  To borrow a term from my work in music production, there is a narrower dynamic range here. The differences between the freaks and yuppies isn’t as vast in Japan as it is in the West. They’re pushed together more closely in social category, just as they are jammed together in the literal physical confines of this crowded city.
But those people who do push the envelope, who press the limits of allowable individuality in Japanese culture, can be found in Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and, most of all, in Harajuku, for the weekly Sunday afternoon freak show. More on that on Sunday!

Feeling as though I had just pissed away a lot of cash on booze with no discernable result, I decided to continue as cheaply as possible.  Picked up a beer at a newsstand (¥158 - I could have bought thirty-two of them for the price of three drinks at King Rum), and then caught the train to Roppongi. Made it there before 11:00pm. I planned to walk from there to the hotel in nearby Akasaka.  Going straight to Akasaka would have required a bunch of shenanigans with transferring trains that I didn’t want to deal with.

Even VD can be bought from a vending machine.

Grabbed another beverage in a Lawson’s store (¥161). I like that there are Lawson’s here. I remember seeing those at home in Ohio when I was a kid.  They all went away.  I never paid much attention to Lawson’s - why would I give a damn about a convenience store chain?  But now that they are all gone (at least in the American midwest) and have resurfaced in Japan, it is a strange, if feeble and tenuous, little link not only to home, but to childhood. The stores at home didn’t so much as close as they just upped and moved over to Japan, en masse.  Maybe Mr. Lawson retired to Japan and took his stores with him.  Still, had I been in Mr. Lawson's position, I would have renamed the chain upon transplanting it to Japan - they have no "L" in the Japanese alphabet so the name is becomes something like "eru-awa-sen-su".

In Roppongi, I noticed something very interesting.
Far more interesting than Lawson’s stores, anyway.
Japan is full of Japanese people.
This might seem rather obvious.
In Chicago, where I live, there are white people, black people, Hispanics, Indians, all sorts of Asians, Hassidic Jews, Polynesians, Muslims, Germans, Polish, Irish, Ukranian, other Europeans, and whatever else you can think of. Probably a few Eskimos. Every other person I see at home is from a different place. But in Japan it is all Japanese people. I saw a handful of Caucasians each day, mostly when I went to big tourist traps. I saw about three blacks during my first three days, and one Indian guy at the tempura restaurant.  No Hispanics that I noticed, and not even that many Thai, Chinese, or Vietnamese people.
Japan is full of Japanese people.

"Indecent fliers collecting box"

So, when I got off of the train at Roppongi, supposedly a big area for nightlife, and a destination for tourists, I was appalled.  It was nothing but triple-priced restaurants, and titty bars (called "girls bars" in Japan).  All of these bars had guys waiting on the sidewalk outside trying to lure people inside.  These fellas were relentless, trying to buddy up to me and entice me into these dens of sin. I do not like strip clubs, hostess bars, or porno stores. Not my thing. I feel sorry for the gals working in there, more than anything, and I also find the experience of being inside these places more pathetic than erotic.  And anyway, if I want to see a girl naked, I’ll go find someone to date.  The naked part will happen naturally if things are going well, and it’ll be a lot more fun in the end.
So, anyway, I wasn’t interested in what these touts were trying to sell.
But I did notice that they all had one thing in common (aside from being persistent and annoying): every single one of them was black.
I had seen like three African guys (from Africa, not America), in three days, and suddenly there were about fifty of them in Roppongi, and every one of them was working in the sex trade.
Can’t a black guy in Japan get a job as anything other than a pimp?
Apparently not.
This lead me to ponder why Japanese teenagers are all so enamored with American hip hop and American gangsta rap culture. It is everywhere in places where kinds hang out, like Shinjuku and Ikebukuro. These skinny, clean, and polite little Japanese kids are all fascinated with the hoes and bitches, the bling, the guns, and the pimpin’ cribs.  At first I was confounded by it all.  Why would the Japanese, of all people, be fascinated with a manufactured culture of greed, violence, hatred, pride in illiteracy, and musical incompetence, where a criminal record is a social status indicator?
It is the opposite of their world in every way.
Walking around Roppongi, it hit me.
Exotica.
The Japanese kids aren’t obsessed with American gangsta rappers because they respect it, they are into it because it is exotic. It is so strange and so foreign to everything that they have been brought up with, that immersing themselves in it is both a minor act of rebellion (there will be no major acts of rebellion in their lives), and a fascinating journey into a land they will never see in person, and can only glimpse in front of the seedy hostess bars of Roppongi.

I strode past these clubs, becoming steadily more impatient and irritated with the relentless efforts to lure me inside. These guys were full of vim and vigor, chutzpah and moxie, but they did not have anything to sell to me.

Perhaps there might have been more adventure ahead of me tonight, had I been in a different part of town.  But Roppongi was a dead end.  All of the dickhead American fratboy types that I avoid at home were in Roppongi.  The Planet Hollywoods and TGIFridays of Tokyo are in Roppongi.  All the parts of home that I dislike have been transplanted, for my convenience, to Roppongi.  Corralled all into one zone, they ought to just put a fence around it and call it "Lil' USA (bad parts)".
Being in Roppongi just made me want to go back to the hotel.

Taking a welcome detour off of the main street, I was briefly amused by a tiny little restaurant, the size of a small, single-car garage, sitting by itself on a lonely side street. Totally random.
Then, I was almost lured into what I thought was a live jazz club called Roppongi Piano Lounge, in the basement level of an unassuming little office building.
It said “live jazz” on the sign...
I cautiously wandered down a narrow staircase. The stairs turned to the right at the bottom. I heard a woman singing. I slowed down, moving cautiously. I poked my head around the corner. In less than a second I registered the following: a beautiful Japanese girl in a green satin ball gown standing right in front of the door, singing. I would have almost had to push her out of the way to get into the room. The room was brightly lit, white everywhere, and very, very tiny.  Another girl in a red ball gown was seated at the bar, also facing the door. A third woman in black, elegant and a little older than the other two, almost leapt out of her seat to greet me as soon as my bald cue ball head popped curiously around the corner.  There were no musicians in sight, no room for any, and no men.
Just the three women.
They’d be after my cash.
All of it.
I got out of there fast. I almost expected the woman in black to chase me up the stairs. Back on the street, I quickened my step and glanced carefully over my shoulder.
No pursuit.
Whew.

Roppongi is to be avoided, and is only good if you want to empty your wallet on expensive processed food, or seedy girls bars.
During the day, there is a gigantic new (vertical) mall called Roppongi Hills which is as generic as can be.
So, in other words, there is nothing in Roppongi that you will actually want to do or see. 
It is the only part of Japan that I did not like.

Consulting one of the many maps posted on the streets of Tokyo (without which this city would grind to a halt), I pointed my feet back to Akasaka and a bed.
I made a wrong turn.
Walked at least a mile out of my way.
Found a park.
Sat in the park.
It was pretty, and quiet, and small, and deserted.
An eerie greenish light at the entrance was the only source of illumination.
I found a big stone lantern like the ones at the shrines I had visited that afternoon, and a small mound of earth, maybe six feet high, with a statue of someone at the top. I could not read the inscription. I am illiterate. The guy is wearing a kimono and holding a book.
I rested among the old twisted trees, and reflected that in any other city in the world, I would be a little bit (or a lot) hesitant to sit here alone in this secluded and too dark park all alone, well after midnight.
In Japan, it felt perfectly safe.

Another map, another mile, another snack at the all-night FoodeXpress grocery store near the Metro station (a liter of water, a huge apple, two asparagus wrapped in raw meat, and two unidentified breaded objects full of something else I could not identify, all for ¥556).

I was in bed before 1:00am.

This has been part one (of five): May 18 to 21, 2008
part one   part two   part three   part four   part five

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