Japan
May/June  2008

back to James writings and travelogues

This is part two (of five): May 22 to 25, 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

Thursday, May 22

This morning, I took the train back to Ginza.
My mission there today was to meet Reiko for a kabuki performance. We’d set this meeting up a month in advance, and I was really excited about it. I wanted to do some other quintessentially Japanese cultural activities like this, perhaps see a sumo match or go to hear taiko drumming. As luck would have it, the most famous taiko drummers in the world, Kodo, were performing near Tokyo on Tuesday, and the two-week long world sumo championships were taking place all week as well.  But... the Kodo show was both sold out and it was a little bit out of my geographical comfort zone (i.e. outside of the JR Yamanote loop), and the sumo matches were prohibitively expensive.  Also, taiko is something that I really love, so I was sorry to miss it, but I would have only gone to the sumo for the novelty value; wrestling of any sort has never been my thing. But it might have been interesting. Given that there were two missed opportunities already, I was really glad that the kabuki thing did happen.

Reiko and I met in front of kabukiza, a legendary theater that has stood since 1889. The Hibashi-ginza subway station lets out right in front of the venue. We were there for the matinee show, which began at 11:00am.

First on the program was a segment from an epic play called Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees). It was written in 1747 as a puppet play, and adapted for live action the following year. It is one of the three most famous plays in all of the kabuki repertoire; the whole thing is fifteen scenes in five acts that would take two days to perform.  We saw a 90-minute excerpt.
The lead actor was named Ebizo, who is apparently quite famous throughout Japan, as a star of film, television, and stage. Reiko was quite impressed with him (I think she had a crush on him), and she bought a few glossy photos of him in the gift shop. His performance, I suppose, was good, although I am no connoisseur of kabuki.  Yet.  Ebizo was magnetic and had a lot of presence, if nothing else.  The stage was huge, although the sets were simple.  Musicians were hidden in a slatted room on stage right, although a lone shamisen player sat in a loft above stage left, and a guy whose job it is to bang wood blocks together for dramatic emphasis knelt in full view on stage at stage left.  The stage also featured a long thrust, or a sort of ramp that ran from stage right, out into the audience, and to the rear of the house.  Actors enter the performance from this catwalk, from the rear of the room, rather from the wings on either side of the stage.  Some of the action took place on the thrust as well.

Then there was a 45-minute intermission during which people ate bento box lunches in their seats. The lunches were available to buy in the extensive gift shop.  After that was a dance performance piece called Kisen.  It was very beautiful, but I had to keep reminding myself that the women characters - as is the case in all kabuki theater - were guys in drag.  It was one dance from a series of six dances about the great poets of Japanese antiquity, in this case the poet-priest Kisen. After a shorter intermission, we saw a segment of a second play called Kiwametsuki Banzui Chobei (or, loosely, The Last Days of Banzui Chobei). This one (from 1881) is four acts in total, but again, we just saw an excerpt, as is the common custom.  It began with a play within the play - the characters in the play were watching a kabuki play, which is interrupted by a fight that breaks out on the thrust (catwalk) out in the middle of the real audience. This one was a little bit shorter than the first performance of the day. There was a little kid in the play who spoke in a bizarre monotone voice. By the time it was all over, more than four hours had passed. It was really cool. I had an earpiece that translated what the actors were saying. For the most part, I suppose that I got the gist of it all, but sometimes the actors would speak for like five minutes, going on and on and on, gesticulating wildly and emoting like mad. And then the British woman in my ear would say something like “he says that he disagrees”. So perhaps there was a little bit of detail lost. However: this is the time at which I must mention jet lag. Tokyo is fourteen hours ahead of Chicago. So if it is 8:00am in Chicago, then it is 10:00pm the same day in Tokyo. As I type this sentence, it is 10:30pm in Chicago on Sunday night; the people in Tokyo are having lunch on Monday afternoon. One would think that the jet lag on this trip would be a nightmare. It wasn’t! As stated above, I went to bed at my normal time on Monday - even though I’d been up for close to thirty hours - but on Tuesday, I felt pretty all right, all day. Maybe a spot of drag-ass in the afternoon, but that was it. I took a little melatonin before bed the first three nights (in steadily decreasing doses), went to bed and got up at my normal times (bed around 1:00am more or less, awake at 9:00am or so), and felt basically fine the whole trip! Except for Thursday afternoon. For some reason, the lag caught up to me just a little while sitting in that Japanese-sized theater seat for four hours. I was intensely interested in what was happening on the stage.  The whole experience of being in the classic and legendary Japanese kabukiza theater was so cool, that I was truly and supremely annoyed when I found myself struggling to stay awake at a few points. Nodding off would not have been good. I was so much taller than everyone else in the place, that I must have been an unmissable landmark in my seat, like the Eiffel Tower dominating the Paris skyline, hundreds of meters taller than any other building in the entire city limits. Also, tall or not, I am gaijin - outsider, white - and I stand out in any Japanese crowd.  The lights were not especially dimmed for the performance.  Had my eyes closed and my head bobbed forward and a little nap occurred, it would virtually have attracted more attention than anything happening on stage.

I can’t think of another time in my life when the struggle to stay awake has been fought with such intensity. All of my attention was focused on keeping my head up and my eyes open.
If nothing else, I couldn’t bear to potentially embarrass Reiko.
The Japanese are so hung up on "saving face" and on the complexities of social manners and etiquette. It would have been beyond mortifying if her clearly ignorant and hopelessly uncultured gaijin companion had passed out during a performance by the legendary Ebizo.

I maintained.
And eventually, the Sandman’s attack passed, I fought him off, my body chemistry readjusted, my internal pendulum swung the other way, and I was able to focus again with clarity and to give the show my full attention. I was sorry to have missed a part of the performance due to my complete inability to focus on anything other than remaining vertical; seeing an excellent performance of this type was an experience that I may never have again.

Later, I was asking Reiko about Ebizo, and I initially thought she told me that his name was Ebisu. Understandable, right?  The latter word means "shrimp", as in delicious crustaceans from the sea. I thought it was quite funny that this luminary of the stage would be named after shrimp.  I tried to explain the Americanized context of this to Reiko, telling her that to call a man a shrimp meant that he was small, weak, and unable to hold his own in a group of men.  This was surely the wrong way to describe one of Japan’s greatest actors.
Perhaps, I thought, the shrimp is a noble creature In Japan, and being named after the shrimp might have a completely different connotation in Japan as it does in the West.
Anyway, it is Ebizo, not ebisu, so never mind.

And on the subject, I looked this guy up when I got home, and discovered that he is part of a literal dynasty of actors that goes back hundreds of years. Also, Ebizo isn’t his real name anyway (more of an honorific, I gather), and he has no less than four other stage names. Somehow, all of this makes sense to the Japanese theater goer, I assume.  Occasionally, an actor takes on a new or additional stage name while within the hallowed walls of the kabukiza, and it is apparently a big deal when this happens.

This culture is impenetrable.

One final note about kabuki is that there is a 24-hour-a-day kabuki channel on Japanese television, and the performance I saw was being taped for broadcast.  Reiko promised to send me a recording of the broadcast when it airs.
I hope my big, bald, bobbing white head is not on camera!

After the show, we visited the gift shop.
There was a lot to buy, and much of it was edible. There were samples of many of the candies, pastries, and delicacies, so of course I tasted as many exotic flavors as I could discreetly get away with.

I was intrigued by a guy sitting in a little stall in the middle of the room, sort of a portable mini-bakery, making pancakes. He had his fire, and everything he needed, right there among the vendors of posters, candies, puppets, and postcards. He had sort of a mold, like a cupcake pan, in the shape of little kabuki actor faces. He was pouring this pancake batter into the molds, filling it halfway, and then pouring seaweed jelly candy on top. Then he’d finish it with more batter. So it was like a little pancake cookie with sweet seaweed jelly in the middle. I bought a bag of them to share with International Rebecca upon her arrival a few days later.
I also got a long brick of a seaweed candy similar to what was inside the pancakes. It was more solid than jelly, but less solid than say a gummi bear. Somewhere between. Eight inches long, one inch tall, one inch wide, perfectly squared corners. Wrapped in lovely white paper with kanji characters on it.
Everything in Japan is so delicately packaged.
This stuff was supposed to last for a month, so (after discovering that Rebecca didn't care for it) I ended up schlepping it all the way to Chicago with me, and then on a business trip to Florida a few days after my return to America!
I shared it with my friends in Florida on the beach.
I also grabbed two schedules for the kabuki television channel, because the covers were colorful and there are some nice pictures inside. Souvenirs on the cheap.

The next mission was to meet Reiko’s friend for dinner. But we had some time to kill first. So we took the train across town from Ginza all the way to Nakano, beyond the western of the JR Yamanote loop, a bit west beyond Ikebukuro and Shinjuku.
There, we went to a coffee shop called Coffee Renoir Ginza, which is nowhere near Ginza, and which does not feature a reproduction (or original) of the one Renoir painting that I observed yesterday and actually liked.

I drank water, Reiko had coffee and lots of smokes. We sat near a second floor window, overlooking a small and narrow street. There was a commotion outside: a few teenagers were ambling down the alley, with a film crew recording their every movement. The kids being filmed were speaking into microphones, giving some sort of interview or broadcast. A bunch of teenagers and a lot of adults were clustered around, snapping pictures excitedly. I thought that it might be some sort of television show being taped, maybe the kids being filmed were teen hosts shooting a little piece of film to be edited into some sort of variety show.

Reiko recognized the subject of all of this chaos. She got a bit excited, and said that these teenagers were Shu Chi Shin, a group of really famous teen idols. I got the impression that they were sort of like a “boy band”.  Apparently they are really big stars in Japan, a major entertainment force at the moment.  I looked back down the alley: the crowd of people trailing the lil’ stars was quite big, actually.
Reiko later wrote: “Right now their popularity becomes a social phenomenon, popular among the young and old man and woman.”
The closest thing to a translation of their name that Reiko and I could make understood between us is "shameless", but Reiko seemed really embarrassed by that word when I suggested it.  She isn’t a shy girl; for a Japanese woman she is fairly bold and confident.  She never used the word "feminist" around me, but I believe she is one of the few followers of that creed to be found in Japan.  She’s intelligent and modern.  So, I am not sure why the word "shameless" made her blush and squirm in her seat a little bit.
But it did.

This culture is impenetrable.

Anyway, will you look at those kids in the picture?  They look as wholesome as apple pie.  The only thing shameless about them is the amount of cash they are apparently pulling in.

We got sushi for dinner at a restaurant called Mikawaya. The restaurant was a little run down, but I was assured that the food was great and that this is where all of the locals ate. I had no doubts whatsoever that this would prove to be true.  One side of the restaurant had tables and chairs, and the other had traditional Japanese seating on tatami mats laid out on the floor. 
Reiko’s pal was an older woman, perhaps in her fifties. She was an organ teacher. In the true Japanese spirit, she brought me a gift, a nicely printed postcard from the Museum of Kyoto, depicting The Millennium of the Tale of Genji. How nice!
Before I came to Japan, Reiko wrote about her friend: “She is really dynamic person who I respect. Her grandfather, the subject of a new movie Nihon no Aozora, was a constitutional lawyer, he recited citizens' equality, peaces, and the abolition arms etc. Also he is the public peace maintenance method violation first arrest person in 1926.”
You get the idea, he was a real Ghandi-type.
We never got to talking about the geezer, although it would have been interesting, but we did eat some amazing food!

It all began with five hand rolls: two veggie, one tuna paste, one uni (pulverized paste of sea urchin eggs - hell yeah!), one (unrecorded, sorry).  Appetizers were little shrimp on tofu squares, and the ladies indulged my love of unagi (eel) by getting a huge unagi fillet over a bed of rice and leaving most of it to me. Japanese hospitality: killer diller. Lots of sushi came next, all but one piece of which I could identify: the mystery fish looked more or less like the “facehugger” monster in the 1979 movie Alien.
Reiko ate it. Damn.
We also had kimo soup. I explained that “Kimo” is Hawaiian for “James”. Also, “James soup” sounds like “Jiumesu” (GEE-oo--mess-soo) - which is Japanese for “James”. The tri-lingual pun, for lack of a better word, was understood by all present parties!
Kimo soup, by the way, is unagi liver soup.
Bring it.

The restaurant’s name card is completely in Japanese, but it is pretty with a sort of blue filigree running across it. Naturally, there is a map on it.

The ladies departed for home right after dinner.
I wandered around Nakano for a bit, and decided (again) to skip the train station right in front of me, and to walk to the next one, just to see what I could see along the way. Also, to get to Akasaka, I would have to take three trains.  But, if I walked one stop, there was a different train that I could get, that would take me to Roppongi without changing trains. After my previous adventure in getting lost walking back from Roppongi, I felt like I now knew the proper way to walk home from there. So faced with three trains, or the combo of a short walk, a train, and then another short walk, I chose the latter. Short walks, for me, when traveling, are anything up to a half mile or so.

Made my way through a residential area full of homes, many of which were in a tradtional Japanese style, and many of which were not. The streets were dark and quiet, but I never felt unsafe. And let’s face it: I am a foot taller than anyone else in this country, I like to wear black, and I have a bald head.  Although I have never been in a fistfight in my adult life, and although I am opposed to violence in all of its forms, you wouldn’t know that by looking at me.  I do not look like the guy to mess with.  In the Western world, it makes for good camouflage in questionable situations, but in Japan, I may as well be Gojira, wading through the city on a path of destruction, inspiring fear and breathing radioactive fire.

There is violence in my wake however:
Walking past a four-story building, the tallest one in the area, I heard - from a block away - strange sounds coming from the open windows of the top floor. I heard a man yell, and then a crashing sound, and then a woman howl. This pattern repeated, many times. Someone was either severely beating the living crap out of his wife, in an orderly and disciplined fashion (domestic violence or just a good time?), or else there was karate practice going on up there. The sound was audible for several blocks. There were very few people on the quiet street, but the one or two other pedestrians that I passed did not seem to have a problem with the disturbance, even given the potential explanations for the sound.

I am going with private karate tutoring.
Really.

Train ride.
Roppongi.
Run away!
There is a major street called Roppongi-dori that runs from Roppongi to Shibuya. Along the way is an area called Nishi Azabu. There are a bunch of nicer bars and restaurants here, just comfortably far enough away from Roppongi to make the area palatable. None of them are cheap, but a lot of them looked pretty good. I also found a nice wine and liquor store called Shinanoya.  A friendly Caucasian guy was working there; he may have been from France originally but his English was just fine.  I explored the very nice looking wines and a very good selection of rums, and made a note to return later.

One of the lounges on my journalistic to-do list, Bar Orange, is in this area, so I headed over there for a nightcap.  I had a map, but it was not as accurate as I might have hoped. 
I had actually walked past it a few times without seeing it.
I needed help.

Japanese people truly are helpful.
I accosted a random woman standing outside of a Vietnamese restaurant, asking if she knew where my destination was.  She walked me three blocks away to another restaurant, a rather upscale place with sharp looking waiters and a black laquered bar and tables.  One of the waiters pointed us in a direction sort of (kind of) back where we had come from. Then the lady asked another random guy on the street, who took over for her and led me to the bar, a block away. The whole time, I felt bad about being such a trouble, and I was asking the lady if she had to get back to her restaurant.  She kept saying, in a dismissive manner, “oh, my customers can wait”.
Next time you are in Japan, and your food is taking a long time to come from the kitchen, remember that your waitress might be busy taking some American guy to a bar.

Bar Orange (1-5-16 Nishi-Azabu, Minato-ku) is owned and operated by a friendly cocktail geek who is also a fanatic for the films of Stanley Kubrick. My kind of fella on both counts.  Had he spoken any English, we’d have been fast friends.  There is a small painting of Kubrick by Wada Makoto at one end of the bar, and a small framed photo of the four "droogs" from the film A Clockwork Orange - a-ha! Bar Orange! - at the other. 

Lil' Negroni, as served, unsipped.

I had a nice (if small) Negroni in a delicately etched glass with a huge and perfectly square iceberg in it.  Having been burned with the extra charges at Bar King Rum, and also since I had no idea upon ordering how much I was paying for drinks, I was skittish about staying at Bar Orange too long or ordering more than a single drink. I would have liked to stay longer, but I could not afford to drop fifty bucks on two drinks again. Turns out that I wasn’t hit with the table charge, or a tax, or any other spurious charges (gaijin tax, as I came to think of it), so my total bill was the price of the drink (¥1580).  A bit pricey, particularly for a Tokyo-sized pour, but I didn’t walk out of there feeling sour about the bill like I did at Bar King Rum.

It really does seem like even the classiest bars (or especially the classiest bars) will charge a table charge, or an inflated sales tax (5% is standard in Tokyo, but Bar King Rum charged 10%), or ask ¥500 for a soft drink (no refills), or all of the above, if they think they can ass-fuck a tourist.
Watch yourself.

Last stop for the night was Shinanoya (about 11:30pm), to get a bottle of Havana Club 7-year (¥2310) with which to keep my flask full. For the price of one Tokyo-priced cocktail and a table charge, I had thirty drinks ready to go, and twelve days left to consume them. A good investment.

Walked back to Akasaka, got to bed early.

Friday, May 23

Today’s first mission was to go to the Tskujii fish market. This is a large outdoor market where you can buy almost any sort of foodstuff that you can imagine. The market is right near the eastern border of Ginza, so it provides an interesting contrast to all of the glitzy shops just a few blocks away.

Even at ten in the morning it was brutally hot, but I persevered, and did my best to enjoy the day.

I entered the maze of little streets, alleys really, off of the main boulevard, and began to wonder at all of the mysterious things for sale. I saw, once again, a lot of potentially edible goods, many of which I could not identify.

Today is the day when my culinary mantra went into full effect: if I cannot identify it, I must eat it. Some of the things for sale in Tskujii are meant to be taken home and prepared, but many of them are edible immediately. Some of the stalls are almost like little take-out food stands more than shops.

I got a big leg of warm crab meat on a wooden skewer very lightly fried (tempura-style), and covered in wasabi. Amazing.

Next was a sort of rubbery loaf of something between potato and rubber that had some bits of vegetable mixed in. Not quite so notable as the crabstick.  Some of the places offered samples of the foods, so I consumed more than a few of those too.
Bought some little dumplings, like you’d get in a Chinese dim sum place, for like ¥80 each.

One place was selling big fillets of maguro (tuna sashimi), and were offering little cubes of it to try.
Using a toothpick, I skewered a bit of the fish, which was an even deeper maroon than I am used to seeing in maguro, and popped it into my gullet.

It was amazing - transcendent!

Easily, the best bit of maguro I have ever had. Where are the restaurants serving cuts of sashimi this good? It was seriously without peer in my (rather extensive) sushi eating history, just on another level completely.
It was hard to resist gobbling up the whole sample plate, and I wasn’t sure if it was safe to just buy a hunk of it and eat it right away without some sort of preparation, so I have only a fading memory of this exquisite little bit of fish. I guess that toro is traditionally thought of as the better (and usually more expensive) tuna, but this maguro was just out of control.

But I did wander past the same stall a bit later for a the purposes of refreshing my memory.

Just before noon, I found a kaitenzushiya (conveyor-belt sushi place like the one found on my first night in town). This one is called Sushizanmai, run by a company called Kiyomura who own a lot of sushi restaurants in Tokyo. I had been told that I’d get exceptional sushi close to the market (or in the market in this case).  That legendary tidbit of maguro had primed my palette for some sushi. So I gave it a try. It was not so great. Average, at best, and not especially a bargain either. This one is a tourist trap, designed to lure in gaijin visiting Tskujii. I only had three plates (six pieces) for ¥812, and then got out of dodge - back into the maze to sample new and more obscure delicacies. I did snag a handy color brochure/menu that lists, with color pictures, all of the types of sushi commonly available. Good reference guide to the more obscure stuff. Once I was full, and the novelty of looking at vats full of baby octopus and big piles of sun-dried giant squids had worn off, I headed to the Bridgestone Museum of Art (1-10-1, Kyobashi, Chuo-ku). Beat the heat with a full liter of water from Lawson’s (¥185) and finished it by the time I got to the museum (about 1:00pm). Entered the mercifully cool building for ¥1000. This museum, like many in Japan, is owned by a corporation in order to share their collected art holdings with the public. Most of them have a permanent collection and also rotating exhibits. This is also not unusual in Western museums, but the museums of Japan typically devote more than half of the gallery space to the temporary exhibits, which is unheard of in the West.  Of course, the overall spaces are much smaller in Japan as well. Most of the Japanese museums give you a handy bi-lingual “list of works” when you enter.  This is good for making notes, but in this case it also illustrates how small most of the museums here are: the Bridgestone permanent collection is a scant 52 works, and the current temporary Oka Shikanosuke exhibit was 70 pieces. So, it didn’t take an eternity to see the place. The permanent collection is mostly late 19th century, heavy on the Impressionists.  Again.  It is interesting to notice that after centuries of isolationism, Japan opened themselves up to the rest of the world in 1868.  This is right about the same time that the Impressionist artists in question were beginning to emerge for the first time.  I don’t think that the Japanese people realize that there was art in the rest of the world before 1868.  It is as if the Meiji period was not only the beginning of Japan's acknowledgement of the rest of the world, but also the beginning of Japan's acknowledgement of world art history.  Never mind the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Renaissance... it all begins with the Impressionists! It is also kind of quirky to have realized that the works are not hung in the order in which they were created, but rather they are arranged in order of the date of birth of the artist. So Japanese!

Just a few notes...
I decreed Mlle. Georgette Charpentier Seated by Renoir as the most expensive piece in the room, and Mondrian’s Dune as the most highly atypical work (not a primary color or straight line in sight!). Next to my listing for Pollock’s Number 2, I wrote “indeed”. Okada Saburosuke’s Western-style Portrait of a Lady (1907) in a rather late symbolist/romantic style, is interesting. Okada was the first Japanese artist to be sponsored by the Japanese government to travel to France to learn about Western art.  He did both Japanese art and Western-style works.  All Japanese museums and Japanese art historians separate Japanese art from Western art, and even segregate “Western-style” art by Japanese artists as being such (as opposed to simply calling it Japanese art).

Oka Shikanosuke

Oka Shikanosuke can be described with a fair degree of accuracy as Japan’s answer to Edward Hopper. Shikanosuke painted a lot of scenes of factories and other industrial sites, free of people, and covered in snow. He also did a series of lighthouses.  His technique was not entirely unlike Hopper’s, but Shikanosuke also experimented with almost pointillistic methods, and at the other end of the spectrum, his work occasionally reminded me just a little bit of Henri Rousseau. Shikanosuke also did a ton of still lifes of flowers, which I moved past rather quickly.

Next up was the East Garden of the Imperial Palace in nearby Hibiya.
Hibiya: “The business heart of Tokyo, and spiritual heart as well. Hibiya is where the Tokugawa shogun built his castle, and was thus the center of old Edo. Home of the Imperial Palace, built on the ruins of Edo Castle and today the residence of Japan's 125th emperor.”
Only a small part of the grounds are open to the public... but not today. After hiking through the unpleasant afternoon heat, I found the gardens closed.

some noble looking guy

I took a picture of a statue of some noble looking guy, just because it was the only thing that I had the option to observe.

Not too far away is Jimbocho, part of an area called Kanda. This neighborhood is known for used book stores. I can’t read a lick of Japanese, but the lure was too strong for me to resist, and anyway art books are universal.
Pictures transcend language.
I really wanted a nice book on ukiyo-e, or the famous Japanese woodblock prints from the 19th century. I have always liked this art form, even though it was originally developed as a way to get cheap prints to the masses by using modern (by 19th century standards) techniques of mass-production. But then again, art deco design was all about taking advantage of modern techniques of mass production too. Such is the state of post-Industrial Revolution art: one generation’s mass-produced consumer goods are the next generation’s priceless antiquities.

Ukiyo means “the floating world”. How amazing that the Japanese have a single word for such an abstract, poetic, and beautiful concept. The word “e” means “picture” - and again, it is kind of cool that the Japanese value art enough to devote one of the precious few single-letter words available in any given language to a word like “picture”.  So, thus, ukiyo-e is “pictures of the floating world”.
To your left is a random ukiyo-e image from one of my books.
Each of the colors you see was added by pressing a different block of wood coated with that color ink onto the paper.  So for each color, a whole new block of wood must be carved.  The blocks must be aligned carefully before printing, so that no one color is displaced from the rest of the image.  The colors are applied in a certain order (specified by the artist) to get desired layered effects.  Each new color means more careful planning, more opportunities to mess up a print, and hopefully, more ways for an artist to show his mastery of the form.
Hokusai and Hiroshige are the two most famous ukiyo-e artists.  I already have a Hokusai book, and the unstoppable and brilliant Benedikt Taschen was set to publish a new Hiroshige edition just weeks after my return from Japan (It happened. Yay). So I wanted more of a general overview of the medium.  I’d had my eyes open all week, but I felt like Jimbocho was going to be the place to find it.

Spotted near the East Garden

It kind of is!
I discovered three small parallel streets just off of the intersection of two main streets. Each of these streets had maybe eight or ten book stores on them. My favorite was Bohemian’s Guild by Natsume Books (yes, the name is in English!), which had a big selection of used art books on the ground floor, both rare and common, and an amazing selection of art prints, both Western and Japanese, on the upstairs level. I suspect that Natsume Books is a larger store, and Bohemian’s Guild is their art books and rare prints outlet. Fine by me. I saw prints by Miro, Dali, Picasso, and many other Western artists, plus a whole lot of ukiyo-e and other Japanese printing styles. All rather expensive, natch.

I also perused some amazing tomes, but none were quite sufficient to part me with some yen. The best ones were too expensive, and the affordable ones weren’t quite impressive enough. Many were imported from Europe, Asia, the Americas; there were many books about many of my favorite artists that I had never seen before.

I thought of my luggage, its weight, and its bursting fullness, and I refrained from weighing myself down any further.

For now.

6:00pm-ish.
Books stores are closed, back to Ginza.
Two more nightspots to check off of my list (remember that I was working on two articles).

First up was Bar Tender (5F, 6-5-15 Ginza, Chuo-ku).
This one is right on Sotobori-dori, the main road in the heart of Ginza. I got there early Friday evening, just as the sun was setting. I went the wrong way up Sotobori-dori, and ended up quite a distance from where I wanted to be.  Seeing that I was lost and looking puzzled, some random Japanese hipster guy asked me if I was ok.  So nice!  I said I was, and then I made good use of the street maps, figured out where the mistranslation in directions occurred, and got to the bar just after dark.  It was mere steps from where I had started.

On the way, I stopped briefly in Galerie Nichido, one of Ginza’s many upscale art galleries (there are said to be over 400 galleries in the area), where I spied a wealth of crap, and one rather nice piece by Eiichi Watanabe. When I asked the gallery attendant who the artist was, he gave me a big, colorful, glossy exhibition catalogue in a nice envelope. Inside was a different (but very similar) piece by Watanabe, and a whole lot of the same crap that had filled the rest of the gallery. I call it "couch art": expensive soulless garbage for rich people with money (but no real taste) to hang above their couches. Cash and soul are not mutually inclusive, but at least this fact keeps a lot of mediocre artists working: they just have to coordinate with the interior decorators to make sure they’re both working with the same color schemes each year.

Right: Bar Tender.
This place is way up on the fifth floor of a building. The sign, also sticking out of the building on the fifth floor, is easy to miss. Inside the bar is plush and quiet. The owner, a distinguished middle-aged gentleman, has a few world bartending trophies displayed behind the bar. He is truly the lord of this room, a real sensei (honored master), held in awe and respect by his underlings. Two guys in their thirties are occasionally allowed to make a drink when the master deems them worthy, and a younger guy (perhaps college age) is the new apprentice: he has been there for four years and has yet to serve a drink to a customer.

Sensei did not speak a word of English, but the college kid did. He was a little bit shy. Awkward and unsure of himself, but sincere and sort of endearing. I guess spending your formative years in the thrall of a pompous (if talented) master will sap anyone’s esteem. The kid told me that he practices making drinks at home every night, using the lessons he has learned at work each day to improve his skills. I have to say that I truly admire this dedication, and I have a lot of respect for any bar that is so deeply committed to keeping the craft of the gourmet cocktail alive.
Sometimes there is a point where things just get ridiculous, though.
Four years? Let the kid serve a damned drink already!
I asked the lad if he had ever invented a drink of his own. He looked shocked, taken aback, almost afraid. No, he told me - wide-eyed and shaking his head - he is nowhere near ready for that. Just to be sure, I clarified the matter: not even at home, not even just for his own fun.
Never.
So very Japanese!

I asked if I could take a menu along with me to aid in my notes, and was charged ¥1600 for it (without being told that there would be a charge). They also got me for 10% tax, for a grand total of ¥5390 for two drinks and a menu.
Ouch.

My next destination was two blocks away, a place called Y&M Kisling (7F, 7-5-4 Ginza, Chuo-ku) another demure lounge with bartenders in cream-colored crop-waisted jackets. After being completely tapped out, spending fifty bucks for two small drinks at Bar Tender, I just could not afford to get hit again for double tax, table charges, and very expensive drinks. I like my high-end cocktails, but all of the other service charges that come with them in Japan put a night of pleasant quaffing out of my price range. Still, I was determined to see what Y&M Kisling was all about.

I made my way through the electric and festive Friday evening Ginza crowds, into a maze of smaller streets off of Sotobori-dori. I saw a lot of expensive cars, valets, elegantly dressed women and men, and spendy restaurants filled up with diners.  This is indeed the part of Tokyo that gives it a reputation for being expensive - but like Manhattan, Paris, or London, there are the expensive parts of town, and the more moderate areas.

Arriving at the very top of a nondescript building via a phone-booth-sized elevator, I stepped into Y&M Kisling.  Of all the places on my list that I had visited to date: Imperial Bar, Bar King Rum, Bar Orange, Bar Tender, and Y&M Kisling, I liked this one the best from a design and vibe point of view. The lighting is nice, the bar is cozy, the atmosphere is elegant but still comfortable.  This is the one I might have liked to hang out at with some friends for a while.  But I wasn’t about to risk dropping an entire Ulysses S. Grant - or the Japanese equivalent - on another drink or two.  Won’t get fooled again, at least not ten minutes after the previous time.
I gave the barman a combination of bad Japanese from my phrase book and some universal sign language to indicate that I was waiting for my friend.  Even this little fib felt very wrong; the Japanese just don’t do these things.
I sipped a glass of water that appeared in front of me, took in the surroundings, peered at some other people’s drinks, pretended to look at the door a lot (as if waiting for someone), munched on some bar snacks with a slight feeling of guilt (as I’d be buying no drinks), pronounced Y&M Kisling to be a worthy destination for a later visit, and made for the elevator - on pretense of stepping outside so as to call my phantom buddy.

Next time.

I reached into the little man-purse that I carry when I travel (it sits under my arm like a shoulder holster), and felt the comforting metallic presence of my flask full of Havana Club. Combined it with a cup of ice from a fast food restaurantd, and planned my next move.

Poked my head into the famous Ginza Lion (built in 1899 as a German-style beer hall), but it didn’t look like the sort of place one went into alone; it was full of groups of friends sitting at festive tables. It was barely 9:00pm, and I was through with this part of town.

Never mind, I had a party to get to, anyway!

Garage rock at Red Shoes

Back in the late 1980s, I was acquainted with a gal named Sandy. I can’t say that we were super close, but we mixed in the same social circles, went to most of the same parties, and probably dated a few of each other’s friends. We were just friendly enough, in our wasted youth, to "friend" each other on a certain social networking web site some two decades later. Noting that Sandy and her husband Jeff (whom I had never previously met) were living in Yokohama, I dropped them an email before leaving Chicago. As it turns out, Jeff was having a birthday party in Nishi-Azabu (near Roppongi), and I was invited.

The party was to be held at a bar called Red Shoes (Chigger Minamiaoyama BLD.B1, 6-7-14, Minamiaoyama, Minatoku), and was to be nomihodai (all you can eat and drink) from 8:00pm to 10:00pm (for ¥3500 - about average for these types of events). After that, all food and drink was a la carte (not sure how to say that in Japanese!), and no cover charge.
I ended up getting there minutes after 10:00pm. I took the subway to Roppongi, and had to walk quite a bit further down Roppongi-dori than I had anticipated (en route I spied a billboard with the face of Salvador Dali on it!).

Red Shoes was the total opposite of the two places I had been to earlier, and was exactly the sort of place in which Sandy and I might have encountered each other many years ago. It is a scrappy little indie bar, with a very loud garage rock trio playing in the corner, and rather cheap beer on tap. Crowded and humid, with dim lighting. I said hello to my long-lost pal, and was introduced to Jeff and a bunch of their friends. Most of the people at the bar, be they Jeff’s birthday guests or otherwise, were wasted.

A group of Japanese people at a private table in the back were decked out in Aloha shirts or vintage sarong dresses. They looked like the quintessential Tiki Road Trip fans. They could have had no idea whatsoever why I kept checking out their table...

Walking back to Akasaka, I paused half way back to rest for a moment in a large manicured park adjacent to a high rise hotel.  I’d walked by this park a few times now, and on this occasion, I sat on a bench, and looked at the way the moon was lighting up the ponds and the trees. 

When I travel I tend to be non-stop, on the go every minute, trying to do and see and absorb everything I can.
Sitting, reflecting, is something I need to do more of.

The all night FoodeXpress grocery store was being guarded by a trio of pugs; they did not stop me from getting my tradtional half-priced fresh snacks and fruit for breakfast (¥869) before going home to bed.

This slightly more expensive than normal midnight feast included a fresh replenishment of my banana supplies, and a liter of a sort of V8-type vegetable juice. Good stuff for breakfast.

Saturday, May 24

Up and at ‘em!
No rest for me!

Met Emi in Asakusa (not to be confused with Akasaka, my home base), which is just east of Ueno, in the northeastern part of Tokyo. Asakusa is one of Tokyo’s old districts, and it served as the pleasure quarters for old Edo. When Tokyoites talk about shitamachi (old downtown), they are referring to the Asakusa and Ueno areas. Do not be mislead however: "pleasure quarters" mean temples, shrines, parks, museums, and culturally important sites.

Our first destination was Sensoji temple (2-3-1 Asakusa, Taito-ku), the oldest and among the most impressive temple complexes in Tokyo.
In order to get to it, one must transverse a long and narrow pedestrian street called Nakamise-dori. This street points like an arrow right to the center of the Sensoji temple complex, and when walking the perpetually mobbed boulevard, the temple complex looms large at the end of the road. Nakamise-dori is full of cheap souvenirs, but the even tinier tributary streets that branch off from it are home to some more interesting shops selling beautiful paper, fabrics, traditional clothes, and ukiyo-e prints.

I looked at a few of the latter, but at that point in time, I really had no idea what good prices were, or what was valuable and what was crap. I know what appeals to me, but I wanted to get something that I like, and which will also be a piece of art, not a mass produced piece of kitsch (I know, that sounds like a contradiction, given that the original intent of ukiyo-e was to be mass produced kitsch!).  In a foreign culture, sometimes the line between something finely made and something mass-produced, a line which is normally clear to me in my own culture, can be blurry. So, looking at ukiyo-e prints off of Nakamise-dori was research and education.

At Sensoji temple, all of the previously described temple/shrine attributes are present, but on a larger scale: fortune telling sticks in octagonal cans, uniquely decorated wooden plaques with prayers written on the back, huge statues of deities flanking the entrance, a coffer that looks like a barbecue grill in front of the shrine, big ropes to ring bells, incense burners, a five story pagoda, statuary all over the grounds, smaller shrines orbiting the main temple, and all the rest. In this case, all of these things are massive, numerous, and are continually mobbed with people.

The main gate gods at this one - according to Emi - were the god of wind and the god of thunder.  I immediately made a connection here: at the age of ten, in the late 1970s, I was (of course) enthralled with the rock band Kiss.  It was many years later that I understood that their trademark makeup had been inspired by Japanese kabuki theater. And now, another connection: one of their most famous anthems is called God of Thunder. That damned song was going through my head all day long after seeing that statue.
It would become significant later in the evening as well. Read on!

   

Sensoji Temple (L to R) detail of the pagoda, ceiling art of the shrine, Buddha statue.

Now, everything I just told you is wrong. An email from Emi a week later informed me that the gods of wind and thunder were being repaired that day, so there had been a couple of stand-ins at the gates of Sensoji temple. I do not know who they were. The god of gentle breeze, and the god of partly cloudy with a chance of showers, maybe.  Kind of like that guy with the Egyptian ankh makeup sitting in for drummer Peter Criss in the latter years of Kiss. Seriously though, these statues are a thousand years old, made of wood, and are twenty feet tall.  Removing them for a little spring cleaning is not a simple or frivolous task.

We spied a real Geisha posing for photos; even the Japanese people were all geeked out and excited by her presence.  This was the only Geisha I spotted in Tokyo the entire time I was there.  My feeling is that she was a plant for the tourists.

I got my fortune out of the octagonal cylinder. It took me some time to match the symbol on my chopstick to the symbol on the matching card catalogue-type drawer containing my fortune. Emi helped me out. “You’re getting warmer...” is an idiomatic phrase in Japan as well as in the West! There must have been one hundred drawers; that is a lot of possible destinies! I got number 62, “Excellent Fortune”.
In three Asian languages and in English, I was promised:
“Trouble and disaster are getting off as time passes by, sign of the future is opening and coming to us. Your fame & honor rise over all society. Those old and ancient got renewed then you can get income again. Getting success in life, and wealth, you are real busy and prosperous.
Your request will be granted.
The patient will get well soon.
The lost article will be found.
The person you wait for will come.
Building a new house or removal are both well.
It is good to start a trip.
Both marriage of any kind and new employment are well.”

You get the gist.
I couldn’t have done much better. Of course, I chose not to fold my paper into a strip and tie it to the nearby tree (or the metal framework standing in for a tree in this case).  Emi was impressed by my good fortune. I was trying to gauge how seriously she was taking this.  We cannot discount this as more kitsch.  A fair number of people (i.e. tens of millions) buy into this process sincerely.  Certainly the temple is making ¥100 off of every tourist who shakes up that can o’ sticks, but there are plenty of people who are at Sensoji out of sincere and heartfelt belief in their religion.  One needs to keep that in perspective when traipsing through the thousands of temples and shrines in Japan.

Emi and I stopped for lunch a bit after 11:00am at a Korean place called Tokori (¥924). It was fine.

A quick train ride took us to nearby Ryogoku, or sumo town!

From my notes:
“Located east of the Sumida River (and a bit southeast of Asakusa), Ryogoku has served as Tokyo's sumo town since the 17th century. This area houses a sumo stadium and museum, as well as sumo stables where wrestlers live and train. While fans view the wrestlers as being nearly god-like, the wrestlers just seem to wander around the district in their characteristic yukata robes. In 1993 Ryogoku became a tourist destination with the opening of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which outlines the complete history of Tokyo, from Edo to modern times. A replica of the Nihonbashi Bridge separates the Tokyo and Edo zones.”

As noted earlier, I didn’t get sumo tickets. We were here for the Edo-Tokyo museum (1-4-1 Yokoami, Sumida-ku, ¥600), which is virtually next door to the sumo museum and the stadium. The Edo-Tokyo museum complex is seven stories tall, but the vast majority of the permanent exhibit is on the fifth floor (and a bit of the sixth). The other levels are used for a theater, a restaurant, storage, a library, and a terrace / lounge area. I liked a full-sized reproduction of a print shop, opposite a step-by-step exhibit showing how ukiyo-e are made (seen to the right).  The knowledge expands.

A special exhibition was being held about Kansai Yamamoto, the fashion designer who did all of David Bowie’s costumes in the early 1970s. So, in the background, behind the scale models of ancient Edo villages, there were huge photo murals of Bowie, of all people. Strange and wonderful.

Even more strange is the museum’s cartoon mascot, Gibo-chan, who takes anthropomorphism to a new level: he is modeled after a famous bannister.

A famous bannister.

How the hell does a bannister become famous?
So famous in fact, that they turn it into a cartoon macot?

Completely impenetrable.

We spent a few hours in the museum, and at just about the same time, Emi and I both sort of ran out of energy.  We sat down in the pews in front of the Nakamura theater on the fourth floor.  There was no show happening, people were just relaxing.  After resting, there was more museum to see, but we sort of wandered through the last section (20th century) in a cursory way.  No mention whatsoever of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the World War II area.  Truly strange.

Leaving the museum, I was excited to have spied a slick color brochure about Hokusai-dori, a nearby street that was designed as a memorial to Hokusai, the famous 19th century ukiyo-e artist.  Although Emi and I were both tired, we decided to investigate.  The street in question was just a block away from the museum.  When we got there we discovered that this memorial walk was nothing but some faded 11" x 14" reproductions of the master’s work pinned up on the sides of streetlights and public toilets. Lame! We had a good laugh over it and moved on.  In the early 1970s, during the era when Yamamoto was doing his costumes, David Bowie did an album called Hokusai-dori. No, never mind, I am thinking of Hunky Dory. Skip it.

Speaking of skipping it, I was a bit too weary to suggest a stop at the nearby Ekoin Temple (a.k.a. Shrine of the Rat Boy): “follow the street lined with Sumo statues until it ends. Across the street you'll see a wooden gate: this is the entrance too Ekoin Temple, one of the most eclectic temples in Tokyo. Legend has it this is where retiring sumo wrestlers bury their topknots. Built in 1657 as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the great fire, it is said to serve as the final resting place for unidentified dead people, criminals, and those who have lost their lives in various disasters. The Shrine of the Rat Boy is perhaps the biggest draw. The Rat Boy was apparently a Robin Hood-like Japanese figure from the 19th century.”
I did spy a big statue of a man standing on a pillar, built on the back of a big stone turtle.

While consulting a street map to get to the subway, I noticed that we were virtually across the street from another destination on my list: the Drum Museum “A mostly hands-on experience with a large collection of drums from Japan and the world.  (2-1-1 Nishi-Asakusa, Taito-ku, ¥300)”.
Sounds fascinating, and it was my chance for that taiko experience, but we’d seen so much already today. I was burned on culture.

The heat was diminishing, but it was also getting rainy out.

Saturday night: time for some mindless fun.

We were to meet some other people in Shinjuku for dinner at 5:00pm. You really can’t get much farther apart than Ryogoku and Shinjuku, but we got really lucky and found that the Shinjuku subway line would take us from Morishita - one stop down the Oedo line away from Ryogoku - all the way to Shinjuku without a transfer. We got to our destination early, so we decided to visit one more sight, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office Observatory (2-8-1 Nishi-Shinjuku, free). This is the best view in Tokyo. There are observatories in both the north and south towers of the this office building, offering 360 degree views of the city and surroundings. We caught the last of the full daylight, and enjoyed the panoramic view.  Mt. Fuji is said to be visible on a clear day, but with the clouds and rain gathering, it was just on the threshold of invisibility.  Some of the foothills and other surrounding mountains were vague shadows on the horizon, and had the sun been one notch more helpful, we would have glimpsed Fuji.  Alas, it was not to be.  Not today, anyway.

Our dinner destination was on the 29th floor of the Shinjuku NS Building, an office building notable for an elaborate and kind of intimidating clock in the lobby.  Six stories tall, the mechanical monster has bronze Chinese zodiac signs where the numbers ought to be. We waited around for Emi’s close friends, Fumio and Ayami Yokobatake. In the mean time, we could not find anywhere to sit!  I actually noticed this all over Japan: benches and other fixtures facilitating repose are few and far between.  Those people expecting to see seats in train stations, office lobbies, and parks will oftimes find themselves disappointed.
We settled for a planter outside the building, in a drizzling rain. Upon increased showers, we decided that standing indoors was better.

We sat down for dinner just as the sun was setting (behind the rain clouds) and were treated to a nice display of purples and blues through the 29th floor picture windows.
Fumio (who goes by Yoko) and Ayami are very nice.
Ayami is interested in the Japanese arts of shodo (calligraphy) and ikebana (flower arranging). She works for a company who have to do with retirement communities; she was very proud of her work helping the elderly.
Yoko is a karate expert, naturally.
This time, I was prepared to meet some new people in the proper Japanese way: I brought a copy of Tiki Road Trip for them. I had a few in my suitcase to give to owners of some of the places listed in the Japan section of the book, but I brought a few extras too.
I told Emi that I’d give her one later.

This dinner, as I had been lead to understand, was nomihodai (all you can eat and drink) for ninety minutes from the time we were seated. Fumio and Ayami ordered beers immediately after sitting, and asked for more as soon as their first round came.
They pounded their drinks quickly! My kind of people!
I did not want beer; I wanted something more Japanese. I have tried sake many times, but my experience with shochu is limited.
Shochu has traditionally been considered to be a peasant’s drink, and has always been thought of as inferior to sake. In recent years, shochu has become more popular and better quality brands have emerged.
It can be enjoyed straight, over ice, or in a cocktail. I tried several different styles, and when I found one I liked, I tried to stay with it.
But Emi, Yoko, and Ayami decided that I had to try them all, and the stuff just kept coming!

For dinner, we got a broad variety of food.
Sashimi, of course, plus a plate of Chinese food (some sort of stir-fry), and some tempura, and a plate of sauteed squid in a spicy red sauce, and a salad, and a whole lot more. Like the shochu, the food just kept coming. Towards the end, they ordered a okonomiyaki, which is sometimes called a Japanese pizza. It is nothing of the sort - it is more like an omelette. It is a round skillet full of scrambled egg, topped with various vegetables or seafood. Some of that sweet brown sauce that they put over unagi (eel) sushi might be drizzled over the top of it all. It is good - all of the food at this meal was good, and almost all of the food that I had in Japan was good. Even the kombini (convenience store) bento boxes were very well worth the ¥ 350 to ¥550 that I paid for them.
Well, while my companions were chugging beers and pushing shochu on me, I was exploring all of the foods and flavors. I was starving from walking around all day, especially since my Korean noodle lunch had been little more than a snack. I am not sure that these people ever saw someone eat so much, and with such enthusiasm!

Slight problem: the booze was nomihodai (all you can consume), but the food was not.
Oops!
Well, all I know is that when Ayami added up the bill, she asked me for ¥4000, which seemed perfectly reasonable to me. A bit of a deal in fact.

My trio of hosts wanted to go to karaoke next. This development was inevitable, right? Emi is actually a professional pop and jazz singer, so she is fine with karaoke. As for Yoko and Ayami, well, they’re Japanese, and karaoke is a national pastime there. Me? I am not much of a singer. It is true that I work in music for a living, but my skills are in facilitating other people’s performances. Musically, I am at my best when my mouth is shut. We went to Big Echo in Shinjuku, part of a chain of karaoke places that cannot be avoided in Tokyo. Big Echo are everywhere. Karaoke in Japan is a bit different from what you get in the West. Rather than people getting on stage and singing for a whole bar full of strangers, the procedure is a little more discreet. Big Echo is set up like a hotel. You walk it to the lobby, get a room, and take the elevator to your floor. There are many rooms on each floor, and they are just big enough to seat a half dozen people (maximum) on a curved sofa. There is a little coffee table, and of course the karaoke system. Your party has complete privacy to do whatever you like, and your warbling and screeching are only heard by your pals. A phone on the wall is handy for calling room service - they’ll bring up food and booze galore. And they soon did. I did not ask for it, but there was more shochu in front of me within five minutes of sitting down on the sofa, and more beer for the rest of the gang. A plate of assorted chips and dips (western style snack foods) came, as did some edamame, a carafe of wine for the ladies, and some other stuff that has been shochu’d out of my memory. Emi really is a lovely singer, and did a nice rendition of the Elvis number I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You, plus the old jazz standard Cry Me A River, before launching into a spirited version of a Billy Joel tune. I was ready and helpful to assist her in pronouncing the "L" sound in "lunatic" as well as translating the word. Can you name the tune? Ayami and Yoko took their turns, and as much as I tried to politely decline, it was eventually my turn. There was really no way of avoiding it. So I ended up having to surrender, butchering I Walk The Line, before noticing that they had God of Thunder in the phone-book sized song list! I didn’t sing it, but I did quaff just enough shochu that I thought it would be funny to sing Sex Machine.  It wasn’t.  My hosts had never heard it, so the irony of me doing James Brown was lost on them.  Emi did get into doing my backing vocals once I showed here where the “Get up!” was supposed to be. We were in this little closet of a room for like two hours, and I got away with performing minimally.  At the very end, the last song of the night fell to me to choose, and let’s face it people, there was really only one possible song I could pick. It just had to be done. I was sure that it must be in the catalogue, and I did indeed find it.

I punched in the song number, waited for the tune to start, and adjusted the machine’s pitch control to some semblance of a key I could follow.
And then, stretching my inflexible baritone to the limits of its falsetto, I spewed forth the holy chorus of:

“Domo arrigato, Mr. Roboto...!”

Afterwards I had to explain the song to my hosts, which also meant explaining the ideas of prog rock and the "concept album" first, and then the story of the Styx album Kilroy Was Here, which I haven’t heard since I was 12... I am not sure how much of this was lost in translation.  Then I had to tell them who "Kilroy" was.

When we departed, it was pouring rain. The hostess in the lobby gave us all free clear plastic umbrellas.  How cool! 
So nice. 
Speaking of nice, Ayami picked up the tab for the karaoke (and all associated refreshments too); it was like ¥17,800! She dismissed my offer of some cash by saying “welcome to Japan”!
So nice.

I have to interject one more time how truly swell these people have been to me.
Reiko, Emi, and their various friends don’t know me from any of the other 300,000,000 jackass Americans walking this planet, but they all went out of their way to show me a really good time when I was in Tokyo.  I was at a loss for how I could show my gratitude for their kindness.  I am still in debt to them.  I hope they can come to America so that I can show them the same hospitality that they showed me in Japan.
I may get to repay this debt before too long: Ayami and Yoko have a dream to move to San Diego, and then to tour across America.  Perhaps our paths will cross again.

Everyone went home.
I stood in a doorway in the Shinjuku rain, under my umbrella, watching all of the kids go by under the neon signs.  Especially in the rain, this part of Tokyo really is “Blade Runner”.  Plenty of weirdness here: a diner called Beef Bawl (not "bowl"), a coffee and pasta house called Ducky Duck, and a place called Men’s Hot Box, where you can go inside and peruse backlit posters of strippers arranged like paintings in an art gallery, and then get directions (yes, maps) as to which clubs to find the actual real girls in.

It seemed too early to just go home - it was only like 10:30pm, if that, but it had been a long day.
Another long day.
A very long day.

In spite of the big dinner, another ¥687 was spent at my personal pantry, the 24-hour FoodeXpress in Akasaka. Snacks for now (a piece of fried fish, three chicken balls on a skewer), fruit for the morning (another giant apple). This time I thought I’d be extra smart and even get a bento box for half price to eat as breakfast tomorrow.  All for under seven bucks!
The elderly man greeting customers at the entrance rocks.  This guy loves his job.  He smiles and says hello to everyone, and he directs traffic to the cash registers.  Even if there is only one customer, he will help ensure that this person gets to the proper register.  He was there every night, and is probably there right now.

Took stock of my cash:
I brought enough yen to spend ¥5000 per day.
There is enough money left for nine days, but I have eleven days left to go.
This is mostly due to getting ass-raped at Bar Tender and Bar King Rum.
I’ll tighten it up and get back on track.
Since there is a 3% foreign transaction fee on my credit card, I am trying not to use it.
Hotel rooms and a few souvenirs are the only thing that will go on the card.

I hit the pillow at midnight, sharp.

Sunday, May 25

Took it easy this morning: cleaned up the room a little bit, washed some socks and undershirts in the sink, tried to make a little bit of space on my camera’s memory card (it was full already), and discovered that my bargain bento box had frozen in the fridge over night. Microwaved it in the hotel lobby, checked email there too, quick bento snack, and off to the train with a banana to go.  Brought my new umbrella (courtesy of Big Echo karaoke!), since it was a little drizzly all morning.

The first stop was Harajuku. About one third of the way between Shibuya and Shinjuku, Harajuku is a minor stop on the JR Yamanote line. However, the train station is next to a small foot bridge, and immediately over the bridge is the entrance to the Meiji Jingu shrine and Yoyogi Goyen.  I’d visited this area a few days before - a lifetime ago it seems already - but there is something special about it today. On Sundays, it is said, all of the rockabilly cats and kittens hang out at the entrance to Yoyogi Goyen, and hold impromptu jam sessions. As it turns out, there is an entire long pathway that winds through the park (called the Garden Path), and about every 100 yards along the path there is a different band performing.  The rockabillies own the entrance to the park and therefore have the most visibility, but along the path, I saw pop bands, punk bands (one was called HUT), hippie jam bands, and singer-songwriter types.  Each of these acts had a small sound system set up and were putting 100% effort into playing to an audience of anywhere between zero and about fifty people. I do not know if the sound systems were provided by the park or not, but there was a person manning the sound gear at each station along the path. All of the sound people were girls. I have met a few women in my twenty-year career in the sound industry, and they all lament that the business is dominated by men.  It is true that there are very few gals involved in sound reinforcement.  I tell my sound production students that there is nothing about the job that makes it unsuitable for a woman to perform it, with the exception of occasional heavy lifting of equipment (depending on the physique of the particular woman in question).  If the sound industry is all men, then I believe it is just because few women are truly interested in doing this job. If you are the exception, a sound girl who wants to cease being the only lady on the crew, then I suggest that you move to Japan! You will be in excellent company, but of course you will go from being the only girl to being the only gaijin... The band with the biggest crowd were a pop-punk band called Acid Flavor, who had a small army of teen girls watching them.  To be honest, they were really the only band that had a crowd at all.  They were solid players, if extremely derivative musically.  A sign near their section of path announced another band coming up next; I wonder if each band gets a time limit in their spot?  Do these kids have to register or schedule time slots to play?  Are the sound systems provided by the park district (or equivalent)?  Who knows!

Back to the rockabillies: these guys are clearly a tightly knit crew.  They all wear head to toe black with accents of red, and no other colors. The girls are the same, with black and red poodle skirts and crinolines.  It was humid and hot out, but they all had their leather jackets on.  Most of them were sporting huge pompadours, and a couple of these Elvis-parody hairdos had to be a foot tall.  Very little real vintage style was on display; I would definitely call this crowd modern psychobilly far, far more than traditional rockabilly.  It was clear that the same two dozen die-hards were out here in the same spot every Sunday, week after week, year after year.
Their instruments were set up in an advantageous place for both listening and viewing, but not many people outside of the clearly defined core group seemed to be there for the music.  A mixed crowd of Japanese people and tourists were definitely there for the freak show, snapping pics of the big hair and mutton chops.  The rockers did their best to diminish the spectacle being made of them, ignoring the photographers, and trying their best to have their weekly gathering without being treated like monkeys in the zoo.

On the other end of the specticle spectrum is the bridge leading from Harajuku station to the Meiji Jingu entrance, a few dozen yards away.  On Sundays, this bridge is invaded by Goths, Tim Burton devotees, and scads of practitioners of the unique Japanese fad of cosplay (costume play - or dressing up in super-elaborate costumes modeled after anime characters).
I used to work for a man who once famously crooned “Every Day is Halloween”, in a song that became the anthem for a generation of 1980s freaks.
What I saw in Harajuku is off the chain, however.

Once, long ago, I might have had some empathy with some of these kids, all camped out on the bridge with an attitude exactly the opposite of the rockabillies over in the park: the bridge people were here to pose, to draw attention to themselves, to show off their expensive and uncomfortable garments, and to be photographed by the tourists.  Had there really been a time, twenty years ago, when my friends and I - to a lesser extreme than the Harajuku exhibitionists - were similarly interested in drawing attention to ourselves and parading around in the most unlikely of outfits?  For me the funny haircuts and black clothes had always been motivated by wanting to look like a member of The Clash, and not by much else.  The stares and attention were a side-effect that I reluctantly put up with. Two decades on, this crop of flamboyant Japanese hipsters have access to outfits that my punker pals and I could never have dreamed of, and that we might have found too extreme even for our outrageous 1980s tastes.

There is a line of demarcation here though: the last wooden plank of the bridge is not to be crossed by these kids, as it marks the beginning of the culturally sacred Meiji Jingu shrine property.  None of them seemed even remotely tempted to cross the implied barrier; I got the feeling that they fully respected the former Emperor’s turf.

Harajuku on a Sunday afternoon is jam packed with contrasts: from the train station, over the bridge of freaks, past the lovely and lush Meiji Jingu shrine, and into Yoyogi Goyen, and on to the string of bands in every style. There is a whole other side to Harajuku, though, a still different facet: rather than crossing over the bridge by the JR station, go straight across the large street outside of the station’s other exit, and there will be access to two crowded pedestrian shopping streets branching off of it.

These streets are Takeshita-dori and Omotesando-dori. Takeshita (snicker) is crammed full of thousands of hep Japanese kids looking for clothing and accessories. Most of the kids on the bridge over by the train station probably did their shopping here.  In a record store, a band called Nightmare were having a record release party for a disc called Killer Show. Posters everywhere depicted a bunch of skinny Japanese kids trying to look scary, while a long line of fans waited to get a mylar Killer Show balloon.
Off of Takeshita, according to my map, is a little tiny street called “Street from Hell”.  This is what it is called on the map!  The street I walked down (50/50 chance it was the right one) was a quiet little cobblestone pedestrian street, lined with lots of trees, a few apartment buildings, and a few nice upscale restaurants along the way. It was the complete opposite of the madness of Takeshita, and yet only steps away.

Beyond those avenues of commerce is a much larger district that is not unlike Ginza, in that it is full of the high end retail: Bvlgari, Dior, Chanel.  The tree-lined avenue Omotesando begins with Condomania (yeah, a store for rubbers), segues into a huge Gap, and then it is all Ralph Lauren and the like.  Amazing how two blocks walk will take you from Tim Burton to Bill Blass, and it is all Harajuku.

Also to be found in Harajuku is the Ota Memorial Museum (¥1000), yet another diminutive art destination in Tokyo. This museum is devoted to my latest obsession (if you hadn’t noticed) ukiyo-e. The institution is said to own the finest quality complete set of the famous print series by Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (which actually contains 118 prints). A museum in Pittsburgh also makes a claim to having the best quality complete set in the world. Such is the nature of collecting prints. Suffice to say, the Ota and Pittsburgh collections, I am sure, are both complete and pristine. No need to argue, people.

This was the first place in Tokyo that I was asked (by a sign) to take my shoes off.  There is a bank of wooden shoe lockers in the foyer, and I chose the one that said "large size" in English and Japanese.  I swapped my size eleven shoes for a pair of slippers, and dropped the shoe box key into my pocket, next to the umbrella locker key that I had acquired outside.  The large sized slippers (by Japanese standards) did not fit on my even larger feet, and I had to keep my toes bunched up to prevent the slippers from falling off.
After a few minutes, my foot muscles got cramped; it hurt!
But actually, it was nice to take the shoes off.

The Ota Museum has a tiny gallery in the basement (the guard was falling asleep!), a tiny gallery on the first floor, and a tiny gallery on a balcony. The exhibits rotate. There were no prints by either Hiroshige or the other ukiyo-e master, Hokusai, on display. Instead, there was an exhibition of works by the famous poet and calligrapher Shokusanjin. Purely by coincidence, his given name is Ota (no relation to the name of the musuem).

“Ota Nampo (called Shokusanjin) was a lower-class warrior in the mid-to-late Edo period who also was a popular author, intellect and a poet writing kyoka (humorous poems using 31 syllables). Nampo was always at the center of flourishing artistic and literary culture of the Edo period, in which people from different social classes interacted with each other. Although most historians consider Nampo as an especially important figure in the development of Edo culture, up to this date, there had been no exhibitions solely on him. In our exhibition, we will focus on Nampo's activities and introduce the interaction between the townspeople and the warrior class as well as the new forms of art that originated from it. Our exposure to Nampo will allow us to reexamine multifaceted world of Edo popular culture.”

Turns out that the kyoka poets and the ukiyo-e printmakers often collaborated, creating images for the poems, or poems for the images. A lot of the works on display were simply Shokusanjin’s poems, written out in the Japanese art form of shodo (calligraphy; literally “way of writing”). Being (say it with me now) functionally illiterate in this country, I was unable to really enjoy those parts of the exhibit.

Although I lingered in the small galleries as long as possible, I was still out of there in 45 minutes.

It hadn’t rained all day, but I still hauled the umbrella around with me.  It looked like it might pour at any moment.  Swarms of tiny gnats were in the air; no they were not gnats, these were even tinier, and greenish. Whatever the case, the umbrella was good for dispersing swarms.

By 2:00pm, I decided to head back to Shinjuku to visit yet another place on my list of destinations for the magazine article I was working on, a place with the unlikely name of The Ghetto Bar. I had a few hours to kill first, so I took my time.  Passed back through the bands jamming in Yoyogi park on my way; they were in full swing, and the freaky kids on the bridge had multiplied.  My camera was full, but I had my secondary camera with me today.  It was actually the better quality of my two cameras, but it had impacted with some concrete in Atlanta last autumn, and it has been unreliable ever since.  Took a dozen or so snaps of the freaks and the bands, but lost them when the memory card erased itself.  This camera is now officially retired.  Ah well, the loss could have been much greater.  I’d have to buy another card for my now-primary camera, pronto.  Walked past one of the many food vendors in the park (there hadn’t been any earlier in the week; they are here to take advantage of the band scene), and one guy was selling bags of little oval-shaped pancake balls that he was making right there.  He gave me one to try.  It was good!

Traffic safety signs on the way to Shinjuku

Shinjuku.
Thought I’d walk by Shinjuku Garden which was “constructed on the site of a private mansion belonging to Lord Naito, a daimyo (feudal lord) of the Edo era. Completed in 1906 as an imperial garden, it blends three distinct styles, French Formal Garden, English Landscape Garden, and Japanese Traditional Garden, and is considered to be one of the most important gardens from the Meiji era.”

I found my way to the park, but it was walled off. I walked along a street that ran parallel to the wall, looking for an entrance, photographing some flowers, and drinking a sports beverage (very unusual for me!) purchased out of a vending machine.  I didn’t find a park entrance, but I did find my way to central Shinjuku, and into lots of shopping.  Remembering that I needed memory (for the camera, that is), I waded through the throngs of people shopping in the electronics stores.  Two gigabytes is the biggest SD Card that my camera will handle, so that is what I wanted.  I knew that if I got a card on-line or in some of the mega-discount areas, I could get one for $10 to $15, but the very best deal I was able to find in Shinjuku was ¥2400. Not too bad, but certainly not a bargain.  I had heard horror stories about off-brand SD Cards dumping their memory or corrupting files, but for the most part (I will not keep you in suspense), I had good luck with this one.

I walked by dozens of pachinko parlors every day, in every neighborhood. From upscale Ginza, to the sleazy tourist parts of Roppongi, to old Ueno, to hip Shinjuku, the pastime of pachinko knows no economic or social borders. Without fail, these places are deafeningly loud inside. The game looks a bit like a cross between a vertical pinball machine (naturally, since there would be room for fewer machines in crowded Japan if they were horizontal) and a slot machine.
A lever flips a ball bearing up onto the glass-covered game board, where it bounces around among nails set into decorative patterns, falling from the top of the mechanism towards a gutter at the bottom.  If the ball reaches the bottom, you lose it.  Like pinball, but with no flippers.  If, on its way down, it happens into one of several a little plastic cups set among the nails, you are rewarded with more balls spouting into a tray below the gutter.
My uncle had a pachinko game in his house when I was a kid, an artifact of the 1970s or so, and it was an elegantly designed mechanical thing, a physical apparatus, free of lights, video, or microchips.
The new machines have fewer cups for the balls to fall into, and fewer obstacles for the balls to bounce off of on their gravity-aided journey downward. Instead, there are neon lights around the edges, electronic soundtrack music, and a small video screen right in the center of the machine.  Between launching balls, the game becomes a true slot machine, with video wheels spinning pictures of anime characters. No different really, than the difference between a 1960s pinball or slot machine and a modern one.
Some people had big plastic tubs of ball bearings stacked up behind their seats.
I snuck a picture and was gently reprimanded.
Gambling holds no interest for me, but I wanted to play, just to check it out.
I had no idea how to even begin.
Totally impenetrable.

While shopping in the busy commercial part of Shinjuku, I noticed a bunch of people milling about in some sort of robes, kind of like karate outfits, but more colorful. Different clans of people had different styles of uniform robes. It was like a bunch of costumed gangs, a la A Clockwork Orange or The Warriors, except that they all had karate outfits on. Or maybe they were roving gangs of sushi chefs. I have no idea. After my tech shopping, I was walking down a larger street, and I noticed more of these guys, accumulating in large numbers in all of the alleys leading in to the larger street. I saw barricades along the sidewalk, and a lot of cops.

Something was about to happen!
I tell you people, I have this uncanny knack for stumbling into parades when I travel. International Rebecca and I (you may recall) stumbled into a New Year’s Eve 2006 marathon race in Barcelona, and then some sort of rollerblade parade in Paris two years later.  And now, in Tokyo, I seemed to have a front row position for something unexpected once again.  I took my space in the “front row” along the sidewalk barricades. Soon, a crowd gathered around and behind me.  A whole lot more of the guys in variations of the same uniform gathered in the street, hundreds of them.  Mostly white uniforms, dark blue uniforms, and light blue/white uniforms. I watched as a rope was pulled across the street, just a few feet to my left, and about three different tribes of dudes all appeared out of the alleys and gathered behind the rope. They were facing down the street, towards my right, looking expectant.  Then, I heard a commotion to my right.  A few blocks down, at the intersection of the next big street, some cops were going by.  I knew that they were blocking off the parade route, and that something would be turning the corner and coming up towards where I stood.

And then I finally saw it.

A parade!
The problem was that the parade was going to crash right into all the hundreds of uniformed guys on the street behind their little divider rope.  The big clash was going to happen directly in front of me!

The parade approached:
A bunch of guys in white carrying paper lanterns on long sticks, and one of those boxes from a Buddhist shrine (the ones that look like barbecue grills) that you toss coins into.
A bunch of girls in orange pulling a wheeled float; on it were people playing taiko drums and Japanese wooden flutes (see picture).
Two geishas with small paper lanterns.
Two official looking elderly men in the back of a convertible. A younger man was walking next to the car with a huge parasol to shield the elders from the sun.
And some more stuff.
It all passed me, but stopped just before the rope holding back the hundreds of guys. In front of me, some more officials in black were milling about on the street. Beyond them were more parade floats and a big gang of guys in maroon. The maroon guys had a sort of portable shrine, and they started doing a crazy chant. Then some more guys, also with a shrine of their own, started chanting too. Soon hundreds of fellas were chanting in unison.
And then the official guys signaled, and the rope fell!
All of the gangs, like seven or eight of them, bum’s rushed the guys with the shrines! Another group poured in from a hidden alley and joined the fray. There was a big melee as the color coded armies went nuts in the street. It was like the end of a James Bond movie, where all the good guys wear one color and all the bad guys wear another, so you know who is fighting whom in the big climactic battle.  But there were many different factions here, and none seemed allied with another!

To be clear...
They weren’t really fighting or hitting each other or using kung-fu or anything (oh, how I long to tell you that "everybody was kung fu fighting, that it was a little bit frightening, and that their moves were as fast a lightning"... but it just wasn’t so). It was more like an old school slam dance pit (back when these things were actually sort of fun and friendly, before they got violent and dangerous), the guys (and a few girls) were all just sort of crashing through each other, bumping around a bit, and shouting a lot.
It was chaos.
Complete madness.
But it didn’t seem like anyone was getting hurt.
What appears to have happened is that one of the challenging armies stole one of the shrines away from the teams who brought it to the field of battle. The chant they were all yelling had sounded a little bit like “A-sa-ku-sa”, so I wonder if one of the groups represented a martial arts dojo (school) from Asakusa, who were (rather reluctantly) giving up the year’s trophy to another town’s new annual judo champions?
I can’t say.
I do not know what I witnessed.
Totally impenetrable.

When I finally found the front gates to Shinjuku Park, they were just being locked - it was Sunday, and they close it up at 4:30. Missing the park was totally worth it; I don't know what that melee that I saw was all about, but I do know that it was something that I will never see again. I can see a park any time.

I made for The Ghetto Bar.
Of course, there were adventures along the way.
All plans are flexible, the journey is the destination, and all roses are stopped for and duly smelt.
Picking the next terminus is simply a way of choosing a general direction to head in for the purpose of continued exploration.

I learned something new. 
What is more convenient than "very convenient"? 
Super convenient.
And what is more convenient than "super convenient"?
Ultra convenient.
And what is more convenient than "ultra convenient"?
You've got it: HYPER convenient!
The most convenience possible without breaking the laws of physics! 
The most convenience that you can handle!
And I love how the U.S. is associated with a military-inspired typeface.

Next, I discovered a little footpath called Shinjuku Promenade Park.
This is a tiny, narrow, and slightly curved trail that runs for a quarter mile through the skyscrapers and neon of Shinjuku. It is lined with trees and bamboo. There are a few small and intimate looking restaurants along the path, but mostly it is like walking through a narrow strip of forest, only thirty feet wide. Just enough breadth to plant sufficient trees to disguise the modern world, steps away, and to allow a stroll through ancient Japan.  I would not be surprised if this path was one thousand years old and has been preserved, as if in a time bubble, by a dedicated team of keepers as the modern metropolis rose all around it.  The trees along the path are all labeled by species.
Then, I strolled by a small shrine (Hanazono Jina), took a picture around the corner from there of people lined up to get their palms read, and then got some snacks in a grocery store.

Found The Ghetto just as the sun was setting. It is a bit away from the busy part of Shinjuku, away from the skyscrapers and trendy shops. The area is more residential.  Stashed my umbrella (the one from last night’s karaoke adventure that I had been carrying around all day, without need), in a secret spot outside, and made my way into the graffiti covered, stand-alone building.
Inside: see Tiki Magazine, summer 2008!

Suffice to say, Ako (the owner) and his wife were really nice (don’t let the name of the place fool you!), as were the handful of their buddies who I got to know over a few hours and a few Asahis and Kirins and some food. Walked out of there ¥2800 lighter, found my waiting umbrella, and headed towards home.

At Shinjuku station, I paused, not quite ready for bed yet - it was not even 9:00pm. A kombini sold me a pint of passion fuit and mango juice (100% juice - no additives!), into which I dumped some Havana Club 7-year rum.  It was a tasty combo.

I parked my ass on a huge concrete flower planter near the subway station and watched the city go by. There is a crossing here, not so big as Shibuya, but a crossing nonetheless, and one thing that most Tokyo crossings have in common are big LCD video screens projecting advertising into the minds of people waiting to cross.  Smart place for a television screen: the one place where people have to stop moving and stand in one place for a bit.  I watched Cameron Diaz sell cell phones to the tune of the Electric Light Orchestra / Olivia Newton John tune Xanadu.
Cameron looked thrilled to have such good cell reception.
I hadn’t made a phone call of any sort in a week!

Shortly after 10:00pm, I was back in dreaded Roppongi, once again finding that walking from there to nearby Akasaka was an easier way to get home than transferring trains three times and making a big “Z” shape across Tokyo. Once again I was accosted by African guys trying to lure me into titty bars.  One of them told me that our meeting was “destiny”, and that we were “meant to know each other”.  He must have learned that line from one of the girls.

Then I noticed that my umbrella, which I hadn’t opened once all day, was likely still resting on that planter back in Shinjuku.

I took a slightly different route back to Akasaka, and as I wandered down a quiet and deserted street, I passed some huge, closely guarded government buildings.  Two-story-tall walls surrounded part of the complex.  Even after midnight, there were stoic guards standing attentively at the entrances. 
This place looked very serious.
No one else was on the street, at all. I was unsure of my next turn, and I asked one of the guards for directions. He was really friendly and helpful.
It is so refreshing, so pleasant, to be continually surpised at how nice these people are. 
When was the last time you met a security guard who was anything other than gruff, belligerent, standoffish, macho, rude, annoyed, or retarded?  In America, they don’t make security personnel in any flavors other than that.  In Japan, they have invented all sorts of interesting things, such as security personnel at big serious important government buildings who are (presumably) good at their big, serious, and important jobs, but who will still treat you like a human being if you ask them for directions.

At the other end of the spectrum, but no less friendly, and no less dedicated to his job, is my septuagenarian buddy at the all-night FoodeXpress.  As always, he guided me with white-gloved hands and a big smile to the cash register, where I spent ¥449 on tonight’s ritual half-price midnight snacks and tomorrow’s breakfast fruit.

This has been part two (of five): May 22 to 25, 2008
part one   part two   part three   part four   part five