Here’s CNN’s coverage of the earthquake on Wednesday night. So a “strong earthquake” and the “strongest typhoon in a decade” have happened since I’ve been here. Someone should call a bookie and figure out what the over-under is on there being one of a: Tsunami, blizzard, volcanic eruption, or gigantic landslide.
And here’s a picture of what El Typhoono looks like right now:
Hey, kids, here’s a tip: Do not have a vacation that starts out like this. It’s not good.
Let’s review, shall we?
Tuesday: Once-in-a-year fog that grounds all flights out of Victoria.
Wednesday: M5.7 earthquake.
Thursday: Nice weather, but I’m too culture-shocked to enjoy it.
Friday and Saturday: Monster typhoon.
I conclude, on the basis of this information, that Mother Nature hates me. Bitch.
The rain that started yesterday only intensified last night. From the 25th floor restaurant in my hotel it looked plenty impressive. Even more impressive was the combination of my dinner — grilled spiny lobster with a citrus and herb butter sauce and garlic mashed potatoes — and the bill. Y3,600 for what essentially amounted to six — six — bites of food. Y3,600, for those of you keeping track at home, is, like, $40. Even eating at the Wharfside you don’t get screwed that badly. (“Well,” I said to myself in the elevator, “I won’t be doing that again!” Everyone needs to get fleeced once or twice on a trip.) There might have been more meat in that spiny lobster, somewhere (they left all the, um, spiny bits on him), but I couldn’t figure out how to get at them. Strangely, though, those six bites of lobster were satisfying. I don’t get it: I’m burning a lot more calories than I do when I’m at home (thank you, reliance on public transport) and yet I’m eating less and am very rarely hungry. Is this still culture shock? Is what I am eating that sustaining? You tell me. This afternoon on the way back from the station I stopped in at a noodle shop and was surprised to find I couldn’t finish the whole meal I ordered. This, after the only thing I’d had all day to that point was a banana. IDGI.
Anyway, back to last night.
After dinner I ventured outside — for all of about two seconds before realizing that it was, in fact, that nasty. My umbrella was inverted twice on the walk down to the Tokyo Park Hyatt, and by the time I made it up to the New York Bar, on the 52nd floor of the hotel, my pants were soaked. I was easily the worst-dressed person in the room (and, for those of you who know me, you’ll appreciate how much of a feat that is — not that I’m traveling with my good clothes or anything). From that height, you could almost feel the wind buffeting the Shinjuku Park Towers; it whipped spray around the roof of an adjacent complex, looking all the world like deleted footage from The Perfect Storm. I don’t want to quote wind speeds or anything, but this was definitely over 80 kph. Back in Victoria, this is “to hell with that, I’m not going outside” weather. In Tokyo, it’s “to hell with that, I’m not going outside, but when am I going to be here next, so..” weather.
The bar: Damn. Now I want to find a bar/lounge like that at home to drink in, rather than my living room. The New York Bar is easily one of the nicest lounges I’ve ever been in but like everything that’s attached to a hotel where the cheapest room rate is $650 CAD/night it’s hilariously overpriced. In their defense, the ambiance is fabulous, their jazz trio last night was superb, and they have quite possibly the best selection of bourbon I’ve ever seen anywhere. In addition to the obligatory L.I.T. (a New York Bar original, featuring sake, Sakura liqueur, and peach liqueur — an exceptionally girly drink, but goes down very smoothly) I tried a couple of 20+ year-old bourbons.
I can hear you now: “Jesus Christ, Mike, what was it like?!”
And my reply is: “Ennh.”
My opinion of gourmet booze tends to jibe with Denis Leary’s: “What’s this?” “It’s a 35 year-old Irish sipping whiskey.” “Oh yeah? Well, sip this! *clang* Gimme another one! I’ll sip the whole bottle, pal!” I don’t drink for the taste, if you know what I mean; I started drinking bourbon because (a) it was sufficiently different from what other people in my demographic drank and (b) it was hard enough to find in a lot of places that it let me seem like a snob. Over time, of course, I have come to appreciate the finer points of bourbon and I freely admit that I will happily sit on my couch watching the game sipping the stuff — enjoying the taste. So, on the whole, the Wild Turkey extra private super-secret reserve was.. very good. Mmm. I’d like to think the location didn’t have anything to do with it, but what do I know? I could see myself doing that a lot if I were on an expense account that allowed me to spend $650/night on hotels. (In another life, I will come back to this place and let the Hyatt staff pamper me. Not while I’m working for the government, though.)
Coupled with the beer I had at dinner, the three drinks I had at the New York Bar hit me pretty quick. The walk back to the Shinjuku Washington Hotel was.. wobbly. Aiming to avoid a hangover in the morning, I bought a bottle of Pocari Sweat (which is about a thousand times better than Gatorade in the taste department — it rules; I wish we could get it back home) and downed it. Watched a Family Guy episode on DVD. Watched a chunk of an episode from the second season of 24 dubbed into Japanese. (Kim is just as stupid in Japanese as she is in English. It was the one where she holes up with that guy in his bomb shelter.) Fell asleep at some point; woke up long enough to turn everything off — accomplished by yanking my room key out of a slot in the console next to my head.
(Pocari Sweat, by the way, is the only drink I’ve ever seen that has this on the label: “mEq/L: Na+ 21, K+ 5, Ca2+ 1, Mg2+ 0.5, Cl– 16.5, citrate3- 10, lactate– 1.” Hey, kids! Here’s a problem for you: Compare the ion concentration of Pocari Sweat to major crystalloid fluids used in volume replacement therapy. What does this remind you of? Answer tomorrow.)
Begin flaming digression: The weirdness of Japanese hotels!
Okay, flaming digression over.
During the night, the rainstorm got worse. It seemed to let up a bit this morning around 10:30, which was when I left the hotel after procrastinating about going out for three hours. My shoes, after all, were still a little damp; I didn’t really want to make it worse, since I only have the one pair here (and my chances of finding shoes to fit size 13 feet in Japan are somewhere worse than my odds of getting to have my way with Elisabeth Shue in a sandbox full of cocaine). Mom phoned while I was walking to the post office (closed) and we talked about the weather. I said, “I think it’s just a rain storm.” Hah! Not so much. I picked up a Japan Times at Tokyo station this afternoon and, sure enough, on the weather map is the tell-tale symbol of a typhoon looming on the Pacific coast of Japan. A story above talks about qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix having been postponed because “Typhoon Ma-on, meaning horse saddle in Cantonese, was near Japan’s southern island of Okinawa on Friday evening, heading northeast and packing winds of up to 180 kph.” Apparently, Typhoon Ma-on has decided to savage Tokyo.
Here, have some links:
Strongest typhoon in decade bears down on Kanto
Typhoon Ma-on strikes Japan, may hit Tokyo
God really does hate me. You see? It’s not just culture shock! It’s also a conspiracy!
Anyway, my plan for today was to go up to Ueno Park, wander around there for a couple hours, then head over to Asakusa to see Senso-ji. I also needed to validate my railpass and book a seat on the train to Kyoto for tomorrow morning, both of which I did at Ueno station — whose calm was a far cry from the zillions of people in Shinjuku. If Ueno had been my local station for more of my stay in Tokyo, maybe I wouldn’t have been so cranky.
The best way I can describe Ueno Park: It’s like the Mall in Washington, only with fewer pools and fountains and less free stuff. Ueno Park is home to Tokyo’s zoo (reputed to be excellent), a science museum (that I didn’t go into, strangely enough), a couple of art galleries (one with an interesting-looking Matisse exhibition that I skipped owing to the $15 entrance fee), and a variety of small Buddhist shrines.
Ueno is also home to a significant chunk of Tokyo’s homeless population. Along the outskirts of the park are hundreds of blue tarp tents with straw mat floors. I don’t know a whole lot about these homeless people, but they seemed pretty invisible. At least, until I reached the end of the park, where they were all lined up in formation — for meal vouchers.
My reason for being in Ueno was none of these, however. I was in Ueno to visit the Tokyo National Museum.
If you’re ever in Tokyo, you must go. The Japanese Art collection is breathtaking, and their historical artifacts are amazing. You’ll learn a lot. It’s remarkable to think that the Japanese had a well-developed aesthetic sense (not to mention the ability to make bronze) back in the 6th century — while, to borrow from Chasing Amy, “you European motherfuckers were still hiding in caves, all scared of the sun and shit.” I mean, think of it this way: In the 12th century sword-making was already an art in this country. Europeans were still beating each other over the head with rocks and hiding behind bushes. While American aboriginal tribes were figuring out how to run buffalo off a cliff, the Japanese were figuring out how to make clothing out of feathers. (The first thing I thought of when I saw this feather-based jacket was, as you might expect, “Try my red robin suit/It comes one breast or two!” I know I’m a loser, no need to send e-mail.)
The archeology section was very neat. I never really realized the extent to which Japan was influenced by Korea and China; both were responsible for exporting cultural ideas, technology, and raw materials to Japan. It was through Korea that Japanese shoguns learned about the use of iron for armor, for instance; I saw a stunningly well-preserved sample from the 13th century. (Oxidation is a bitch, though.) The pre-history of Japan was interesting too — because it sounds so much like the pre-history of North America. Looking at the stone tools that were in use here, they’re so much like the ones you’d see on the coast from the same time period. Coincidence? I think not.
The Tokyo National Museum also has a special exhibit on right now — treasures from China’s past. This collaborative production is stunning, and I’m really pissed they wouldn’t let me take pictures because there was so much neat stuff it’s a shame I can’t describe it all. The thing that sticks out in my mind most of all was the jade suit stitched together with gold wire from the western Hon Dynasty in 525 AD. It looks like.. nothing I’ve ever seen before, and if I can find a picture on the Web, you can expect it linked here soon. Seriously, a hell of a thing. If you’re anywhere near Tokyo in the next couple of months, go. You’ll thank me later.
Mom, you weren’t kidding: You would have totally enjoyed it.
Museum time was great. I dropped my backpack in a locker and wandered around in damp clothes drying off. By the time I was finished and ready to go back outside, three hours later.. it had turned into an evil version of winter weather in Victoria. Solid sheets of rain fell from the sky. Wind whipped the sheets of rain sideways along the ground. My rain jacket.. the less I say about it the happier I’ll be, actually. I didn’t have a lot of choice, though, so I ventured back outside and immediately found my pants soaked up to my knees. “Scratch going to Asakusa,” I thought. Everything I wanted to do in Tokyo — the stuff I wanted to do, that is, after I recovered from the jet lag and the culture shock — is outside. Seriously. There are, like, two indoor things on the list and they both require a lot of wandering around outside to get there. The TNM is a good ten minute walk from Ueno Station through the park, and while that’s not a long way to go on a nice day it’s a hell of a hike in the middle of a typhoon. Even the locals were making a run for it: People in the park were streaming out of it in a real hurry, and the trains back to the suburbs were significantly more loaded than the trains coming in.
There’s a lesson here.
Came back to Shinjuku. Practical tip for anyone coming to Tokyo: The guide books all say that the Yamanote Line is the most convenient for tourists, and it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s the most convenient for everything. I think the best way to use it is to think of it in quarter sections. The Chuo line cuts straight across from Shinjuku to Tokyo, and it’s a hell of a lot faster to jump an express Chuo line train and then transfer to the Yamanote at Tokyo for points on that side of the loop. Shinjuku to Tokyo takes about 35 minutes on the loop line; it’s less than 10 on the Chuo.
Begin flaming digression: Tips for the culinarily fearful: Noodle time!
It is absolutely impossible to go wrong with noodles. Seriously. No matter what you think about other forms of Japanese cuisine, I’ve yet to meet anyone who won’t eat udon or soba. If it’s combined with something else, yeah, I can see this being a problem, but on their own noodles are probably hands-down the safest food you’ll find. They’re also hugely comforting when you’re soaked to the bone and hungry. The easiest way to get noodles is to find a place that has a dozen or so plastic examples in its window with price tags attached. Inside is usually a vending machine, into which you feed money, push a button, and get a ticket. Some places have numbers attached to the plastic food; others don’t, so you’ll have to match up squiggly symbols to figure out what it is that you want. Take your ticket and hand it to the guy behind the counter in the funny hat. Pick either soba (thin buckwheat noodles) or udon (thick flour noodles). Wait a few minutes. Collect your plate. Eat. Feel better.
This is quite possibly the easiest way to get non-pre-packaged food on the planet. It’s like ordering at a fast-food joint where the pimply teenagers have been replaced by machines. (It’s debatable whether this would be an improvement at most North American fast food restaurants.) I’ve pretty much stayed out of restaurants so far because (a) they’re insanely expensive and (b) I don’t trust my 0rd3ring sk1llz, and I was lead to believe that if I can’t do something well I ought not to do it at all (which I realize is part of the whole culture-shock problem), so these noodle joints have been a lifesaver. It’s practically idiot proof, and it’s fast. I wish we had these back home. Even one would be good. Noodle Box is a nice approximation, but they have too much extraneous “stuff” in their food.
And it’s helping me work up the courage to try ordering in other restaurants (though I’ll tell you right now that “eigo no menyu ga arimasu ka?” is your best friend).
End of flaming digression!
By the time I made it back to the hotel everything was soaked. Even my backpack, which is pretty waterproof (I once used it to haul water to put out a campfire), was soaked through — bad news for my camera, which seemed at times today to be a little reluctant to do the rewinding thing. (This worries me. I had to do one film change inside my backpack, and another in a dark bathroom. Everything else checks out ok, though. I’m giving some serious thought, however, to running a test roll through tomorrow and dropping it off at a 1-hour lab in Kyoto just to make sure.) Thank god I was wearing my convertible pants — the very wet part (i.e., the bottoms) could be detached, and now I’m wearing damp shorts. My shoes, on the other hand, are not so easily fixed. I ended up leaving them in the bathroom with the hair dryer stuffed inside and the switch taped down (no heat, though). It helped some, but I’m worried about tomorrow.
This has been a fabulously long entry so I’m going to quit now. It’s my last night in Tokyo and I would have preferred to be able to do something, but it looks like it’s obento in my room and more Family Guy thanks to the weather (the rain is slapping into my window with a distressing amount of force). Tomorrow I’m off to Kyoto on the 9:36 train, which means I’ll probably be out of here early-ish. Assuming, of course, that JR doesn’t suspend operations because of the weather (several lines in and around Tokyo were shut down today because of the typhoon; see the above stories).
I don’t know how much Internet access I’ll have in Kyoto. My hotels in Himeji and Hiroshima apparently have IP in all their guest rooms, so I’ll have that, but it may be a while before I update again.
See you then!
Probably the most interesting thing that happened all day was getting my head stuck in an umbrella. It’s the sort of thing that would only ever happen to me, and by saying that this was the most interesting thing that happened all day I am by no means suggesting that the day sucked. I am, however, saying that this was the most interesting thing to happen to me today from a comedic perspective — because my life is nothing but one big joke, and, well, this was probably funny.
But first, the weather report.
It’s raining today. It wasn’t too bad in the morning — when I left the hotel around 09:30 (I have a pathological inability to get up on vacation any earlier than that, which means I’ve apparently given the fish market a pass) there was a light mist, a drizzle of sorts, falling over Tokyo. I walked down Koshu-Kaido humming Tori Amos’ “Father Lucifer”: “Father Lucifer, you never looked so sane / You always did prefer the drizzle to the rain.” About halfway to the station I decied it was time to buy an umbrella at the AM/PM. Y1050, which seems like a good deal until you realize it’s basically $10. But, whatever, it’s raining, and I needed an umbrella.
This umbrella came with an automatic open feature. Like most spring loaded umbrellas, it was fun to push the button and watch it fly open. What I didn’t realize is that this umbrella also had an automatic close feature. (Because, you know, that’s the sort of thing you’d expect on an umbrella.) So there I was, walking down Koshu-Kaido, idly tapping the “open” button with my finger, when all of a sudden the umbrella closed on my head. fwoof! I can’t see where I’m going, and I get the feeling that people are staring at me. I pull it off and discover two ten year-old boys laughing at the gaijin with the umbrella stuck on his head.
As I said, it was the high comedic point of the day.
I set out in the morning for the Imperial Palace Gardens, which, of course, turned out to be closed. (Why? Because it’s Friday, that’s why.) But you can still wander around the outer park, and I had a lovely hour-long walk around the moat with some good pictures of the Nijubashi bridge and the Sakashitamon gate. There was a gaggle of school children wandering around too, on an enforced scholastic outing so far as I could tell. By this time I had stowed the umbrella and switched to my rain jacket, which, being a $20 rain jacket acquired in Oregon back in August, is little more than a thick vinyl sheet with holes for your arms. I thought the theory was to stay less wet; as it turned out, I managed to trap basically all of my body’s perspiration in this thing. It got bad enough I had to let the sweat run out the arm holes. (Ew, I know, but there’s a reason why I mention this.) Arguably I got wetter wearing the jacket than I would have wandering around without it — at least, in the morning.
There were some very pretty swans swimming on the moat, along with some ducks and other birds I couldn’t identify (but reminded me strongly of finches). The park around the Imperial Palace is very nice, the lawns neatly manicured and the trees carefully groomed in a style I dubbed “bonsai writ large.” It was relaxing. You could almost forget you were in Tokyo — assuming, of course, you didn’t turn around and see the eight lanes of traffic behind you, or look in the wrong direction to see the Tokyo Tower looming out of the fog. (I didn’t go to see it, and I don’t plan to go to see it. Like most large towers in urban centers, it is apparently a giant tourist trap.)
Having had a chunk of my morning’s plans killed due to bad planning (none of my guidebooks, it should note, mention that the East Gardens are closed on Fridays), I went back to Tokyo Station and caught the train two stops up on the Yamanote line to Akihabara and spent two hours exploring the place. I once heard Akihabara described as “the place where anything that runs on electricty is sold,” and it’s not far off. There are huge, multi-story department stores that sell consumer durables, but far more interesting to me were the little stalls on narrow alleys that sold.. everything else. One stall sold nothing but switch buttons. Another featured LEDs of all shapes and sizes and colors. There were several versions of what I called “Cabling World,” where you could buy basically any kind of wire on the planet, including 2,000 foot runs of Cat5 for insanely good prices. (I haven’t priced that much Cat5 in a long time, but I’m willing to guess that Y4,500 is a good price.) Breadboards and circuit etching solutions were widely available. Basically anything you could want to buy that related to the movement of electrons through metal was for sale here.
As for the department stores and the consumer goods: It was a bit of a letdown. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to buy, or anything I needed to buy. About the only thing I really wanted was a pair of noise-cancelling headphones but I wasn’t prepared to spend Y25,900 for them. I will say this, however: The diversity of MP3 players, PDAs, digital cameras, CD players, and Walkmen and Walkmen-clones far exceeds anything we have in North America. I saw this teeny tiny MP3 player that looked exactly like a 1/4 scale iPod (with a touch stick instead of the wheel thingy). Where we might be able to buy a USB stick-style player and have it come in black and silver, Akihabara features the same player in 15 different colors and accents, and at least four different base styles. In my younger and stupider days I might have bought a lot of stuff, but in the end I escaped Akihabara only Y1,040 poorer: Y880 for a 16-pack of AA batteries (the batteries in my digital camera died while I was in Cabling World, a stroke of luck), and Y160 for the bottlecan of diet Coke I had while talking on the phone.
Choices for the rest of the afternoon included trying to make my way out to Asakusa or up to Ueno, both of which are going to be left for tomorrow. Instead, I hopped a train across to Shinjuku and then backtracked down to Harajuku. Tomorrow night there might be legions of strangely dressed teenagers, but today’s trip was all about the Meiji Shrine.
Meiji-jingu was originally built in 1920 but destroyed in WWII; the current structure dates from 1958 but you couldn’t tell if you didn’t have the guidebook in your hand. It looks authentic. As you approach the shrine from the Harajuku station, you come across several huge torii, made from 1,700 year-old cypress trees harvested in Taiwan. These things are big; I have print images of them, and I deliberately included a large-ish human in one of the frames for scale purposes. “Big” does not do them justice. “Huge” seems crude somehow. They are.
The shrine itself is set on about 175 acres, of which I saw about two. The brochure I picked up informs me that “almost all of the 100,000 and more shrubs and trees in the precinct were donated generously by the people from all parts of Japan. Therefore they include all the species of trees to be found in this country.” They did a damn good job donating — the gardens are beautiful, even in the mist and the rain (arguably more beautiful in the mist and the rain). Meiji-jingu, as you might expect, is where Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken were enshrined; it is, to put it mildly, the central focus of Shinto in Japan. Babies are brought here, and newlywed couples arrive in their finery for blessings of a happy life. It was a good thing I knew this in advance, otherwise the sight of several people in tuxedos might have deeply confused me.
Approaching the shrine, you pass through several torii gates (I don’t know what the plural of torii is, though I suspect it is, um, torii) until you reach the temizusha, the font of ablutions. You rinse off your hands and mouth using water from a stone basin and bamboo dippers (the water is agreeably cold and crisp). Walk across the main courtyard and stare at the sacred tree with the prayer cards — really blocks of wood — hung on vertical fencing. These blocks have all kinds of things written on them, including my favorite: “I WISH I WAS SPIDERMAN,” written in the handwriting of someone who could not have been more than about five. The priests offer the prayers to the gods every morning — kind of prayer-by-proxy gig.
The main shrine itself — there’s not much I can say. I’m not Shinto and I barely qualify as a Buddhist anymore (I prefer “evangelical Capitalist”), but seeing people come in, make an offering, and pray was a deeply moving thing. The moreso for me since I couldn’t think of anything to pray for, which made me feel worse. (In an annoying pop culture moment I flashed back to the scene in Garden State where Large explains how he couldn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, and how that made him even sadder.) Eventually I made an offering of Y15 (the Y5 is considered to be more useful, since Y10 coins are believed to engender luck further in the future — I figure that with Y15, I was covered either way) and said my own prayer, and no, I’m not going to tell you what it was since I sorta suspect the “if you tell someone it won’t come true” superstition applies here, too. Let’s just say that the people I am closest to were in it, and that I hope we all get what I asked for.
By this time it was raining. Hard. Much of Meiji-jingu can be seen by wandering around covered walkways, which was good, but you still have to walk through the trees and plants to get out of there. I was soaked — a combination of rainwater and sweat had added about a pound of weight to my t-shirt. It was approaching the start of rush hour, and I made myself a little promise that in exchange for suppressing my agorophobic tendencies I wouldn’t get caught in a train at rush hour, so I decided that I’d had a good enough day (six hours walking around in the rain and the cold is plenty for anyone) and hoofed it back to the hotel, stopping for udon on the way. I don’t think I’d ever looked forward to getting out of my clothes so much (opportunities for naked cavorting with members of the appropriate sex included); a very hot bath did wonders for my cold and very sore self. (My feet and legs are killing me.)
Those clothes are on their way to the cleaner (I wanted a coin laundry but the hotel has a fantastically convenient laundry service of its own) since I couldn’t really see any way to dry them out in an expedient manner short of holding the hair dryer to them. I’m warmed up, comfortably dry, and in a good mood again. My rain jacket is.. inside out, hanging under the A/C vent, in the hopes that it’ll dry out enough for re-use tomorrow (though I’m going to seriously re-think that if necessary). I’m about done with this entry, so I’ll be heading downstairs to dock hallie and post it to the LJ server.
Plans for tonight include dinner at the steak and shabu-shabu place in the hotel, a trip down the block to the New York Bar for a drink, and the rest of the night in my hotel room. I bought some chips, a banana, a lemon-flavored drink (with 1,400 mg of ascorbic acid, according to the label that I can decipher) and some Oreos; I’m going to spend the night watching the movie I didn’t watch last night — the perfect way, in my opinion, to recover from a long day out in the rain, to rest my sore feet, and let my body recover a bit more.
After undocking hallie in a fit of annoyance and depression I resolved that I really needed to find something to eat. I took the elevator down to the second floor, which contains (among other things) about four restaurants. But I got off the elevator and heard.. music. The basement of the hotel is kind of like a shopping mall, and there was a folk-rock group playing between two pillars. A small crowd had gathered. I watched.
They were called Solt. I don’t know what that means, if it is supposed to mean anything at all. They were very good — reminded me of going to see Carolyn Neapole or Michelle Morand when they still had live shows in crummy little venues with jury-rigged sound systems. I would have bought a CD if I could have found one. Music, my savior; they played me out of the mall and into the darkness of west Shinjuku. I felt better almost immediately. In search of food, wallet and digital camera in tow, I hit the street.
I hadn’t really planned to end up in Shibuya. What happened, really, was that I started wandering around the back alleys of western Shinjuku. I “accidentally” found Yodobashi Camera, even though I kinda sorta knew where it was to begin with. I wandered through an electronics shop and marvelled at the amount of stuff for sale. (Some of the tiny laptop computers were plenty cute, and put hallie to shame in terms of specs.) Lots of neon, lots of light. I spent some quality time — but no money — in the Odakyu department store, with its giant cosmetics floor. The gay man in me was pretty sure he could find some really good skin care stuff in there, but the gay man in me, alas, speaks only English (and I don’t really know how to pull off “fag” in
Japanese). There was a wig outlet in Odakyu with an astonishingly large number of wigs for sale — I didn’t realize that baldness among women was a problem in Japan, but apparently it is.
And then I decided that I wanted to see The Intersection — the Hachiko exit from Shibuya station, reputedly the busiest intersection in the world. So I hopped a train out to Shibuya.
Something I discovered last night: I like Tokyo more in the dark. A lot more. Yesterday I wrote about being able to understand it on an inanimate level but not an animate one; Tokyo, for whatever reason, becomes more understandable at night. The scale seems reduced, for starters, and the city simply has more personality in the dark. I don’t know why this surprises me: I like most cities better in the dark. (As an aside, people who never see the city in which they live in the middle of the night really don’t know what they’re missing. Stay up late sometime and go for a drive through downtown at 02:00 or so, and you’ll be able to appreciate your city on an entirely different level.)
Shibuya was dramatic. I can’t really say I found anything hugely interesting in and of itself but the experience as a whole was remarkable. I purposely got lost (well, ok, it was sort of by accident since I said, “oh, this must be a shortcut” — hah, right) and then had to navigate my way back towards Hachiko along the freeway. Fun times: Touts on the street peddeled their wares using megaphones; burly white guys tried to entice me to venture into Gas Panic, a club that is known for having fights break out (no thanks). Tiny shops were everywhere — the diary hut, the chopstick hut, the battery hut.
The intersection, by the way, really is that busy. When the lights change pedestrians come spewing out from five different directions, and the whole effect was eerily reminiscent of the scene in “Fear of a Bot Planet” where Leela and Fry get caught in the robot rush hour. (I don’t know why that comparison came to mind.) Lost in Translation fans will be able to see several things that look familiar at this place.
I ran into a bunch of white people in Shibuya, doing more or less the same thing as I was. Three were annoying yuppie-types yelling into their cellphones about deceiving Japanese business partners. Most, however, were just tourists out looking at the city in which they found themselves. And you know what? They were almost all German or Finns. I don’t know what to make of this (although I knew, from my admittedly non-scientific survey of tourists who end up in the emergency department, that Germans like to take their holidays around this time of the year). Hauke, his girlfriend (Petra?) and I had a nice little chat standing at Hachiko intersection; it was great, in its own way, to be able to talk freely with someone for the first time in a couple of days. The time I spent logged on to the net reading the familiar sites, replying to e-mail, and talking to J. on MSN (albeit briefly) helped too — it really was the isolation. I resolved, right then and there, to spend at least an hour per day trying to talk to people locally, and at least an hour catching up on things back home.
(I also discovered that an hour of honest-to-god IP connectivity in my hotel’s lobby was $9 — back home I’d think this was highway robbery, but here I think it’s a total steal.)
Eventually I headed back to Shinjuku. I walked down Koshu-Kaido and decided that, since it was damn near 21:00, it would probably be a good idea if I found something to eat. Nothing seemed especially appealing, but I finally caved and went into the Japanese equivalent of an automat crossed with a noodle shop: Put your money in a vending machine, get a ticket, pick up your noodles. Soba and prawn tempura. Y420. Fuck, it was good — the first food I’d really had in 48 hours. And it just about filled me up. Slurpy, hot, and I could
tell my body really wanted it.
The MGA observation deck was still open (they’re open until 23:00) so I went upstairs again and took more pictures. Tokyo at night really is gorgeous. Incidentally, the inside of the MGA observation deck is a
giant toy store and a nifty lounge. No, I don’t know why this is so, but you’d think the lounge would be enough. The ambiance was kind of ruined by incessant electronic beeping.
Ten Random Lessons About Japan (so far):
Speaking of ramapnt consumerism: I hate the fact that every time I get change it seems to comes back in Y10 increments. For Canadians, this is like.. you pay for ~$5 worth of something with a $10 bill, and you get a $2 coin and 12 quarters. Fortunately, there’s a solution. There are machines all over the place where you can exchange your extraneous coinage for something more convenient — usually an aforementioned bottle of liquid. I converted my 20+ Y10 coins into a can of Sapporo beer. Yay beer!
If anyone feels a burning need to call me, you can: 080-3451-3828. I have no idea how you dial this number from Canada (though I suspect it involves punching in the country code for Japan, whatever that is, and then entering that number in its entirety; 080 seems to be the city routing code for something), but incoming calls for me are free, and if you feel like talking, please don’t hesitate to call.
Remember that Japan is 17 hours ahead of PDT, 18 hours ahead of MDT. If it’s 17:30 here, it’s 01:30 in Victoria.
The flight. Oh, God, the flight. I was, as I predicted, stuck in the middle seat on a 3-4-3 configured 747. A word about JAL economy: Don’t fly it. I’m a little taller than most, and probably a little bigger than I should be, but I don’t see how anyone who isn’t of standard Asian stature could comfortably fit in those seats. I put a magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. I could no longer fit my knees in the space between the seats if I put my feet flat on the floor. The space under the seat in front of me was totally unusable — I had to put my feet there. Even so, every time the guy in front of me shifted around, his seatback came into my knees; I had little red bruises on my knees when I got off the plane. The seat cushion extended maybe a third of the way down my thighs. My entertainment handset was broken, and my reading light pointed at the guy sitting next to me. (Both of these were fixable, sort of.) I managed to get up exactly twice during this flight, and both times I had to grab on to something to pull myself up, since my legs didn’t seem to want to work. I dropped a bottle of water at the beginning of the flight. I didn’t get it back until Narita (but this turns out to be fine, since, as I said, there was no way I was getting up more than twice during this flight).
When you spend an extra five minutes in the bathroom because you like the space it affords, there’s something seriously wrong. I think I get more room on Jazz Dash 8 flights to and from Vancouver.
Narita is a very nice airport, save for the crush of humanity. I am coming to realize this about myself: I am a borderline agorophobe. At YVR in the international departures I was trying to stay calm (harder to do given the aforementioned weather- and seat-related, um, issues) amid the teaming masses of people. It is extremely clean. It is relatively easy to get around. Customs and Immigration was cleared with a minimum of annoyances (though the Immigration guys really should get a more clear set of instructions for completing that card). The NEX from Narita to Shinjuku was an oasis of peace, uncrowded, and comfortable. Also, I had more than enough leg room. Rolling through the fields east of Tokyo I was able to sort of think that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Then I hit Shinjuku.
That agoraphobia kicked in the second I made it up to the exit floor. The smell of human beings, cigarette smoke (the Japanese are perhaps one of only three ethnic groups who remain inveterate smokers), strange food — my head started to spin. Okay, I’d been up for 20+ hours at that point, but still, I work shifts in that state and I don’t feel that lousy. Finding my hotel was a bitch; I turned the wrong way walking out of the station and only realized it five minutes later. Then I took another wrong turn. These were interesting
wrong turns, in that I ended up overlooking one of the big neon streets here, but unhelpful for someone who just wants a bed to fall into.
I finally found the building, but couldn’t figure out how to get inside. By the time I reached the reception I couldn’t see straight, was sweating like crazy (it’s really warm and humid here), and was about ready to collapse. Which I more or less did when I got to my room (but not before figuring out what the goddamn piss hell weighed so much in my backpack; I’m still not sure, but my shoulders hurt like hell).
This was around 19:00 Tokyo time.
At 23:40 or so, I was bounced out of bed — very almost literally — by an earthquake. Yes, you heard me right: A magnitude 5.7 earthquake hit Tokyo just before midnight last night, jolting me out of a sound (and drugged!) sleep and leaving me in full-blown panic mode. Instinctively I rolled out of bed on to the floor, cowering, realizing I was pretty well screwed if the 10+ stories of the building above me decided to come down on my head. The shaking lasted maybe twenty seconds (I counted) and although I was well aware that peak intensity follows the arrival of the initial seismic pulse, I swear it got stronger as the quake went on. I seem to remember thinking, “Well, this is just great. The entire trip so far has sucked, and now
I’m going to die in a goddamn earthquake. I should have stayed home.”
The shaking eventually ended but I was too keyed up at this point to go back to bed. So I got up, got dressed, and wandered downstairs. The PA was blaring announcements in Japanese, with only the fourth or
fifth word comprehensible to me. I had no idea whether these announcements meant we had to evacuate or what, but I decided that getting out might not be a bad idea at this point. Eventually someone got on the PA (probably after noticing the knot of white people standing around in the lobby trying to figure out what was going on) and explained (in English) that all was well, the building was designed to withstand these kinds of things, and we should go back to bed. Uh-huh. I hit the street.
Shinjuku after dark — particularly after midnight — is a much more interesting place than during the day. It feels pretty safe, all told, even with the streets more or less deserted. I tried phoning everyone I knew who was likely to be up at 08:30 Pacific, ultimately getting a hold of Skippy, who told me to just ride it out. Thanks a lot, man. I took some pictures of the Tokyo Fire Department in action (sadly, the one I took of their cartoon dog mascot didn’t come out too well) as they roared up and down the street running from call to call. I walked through the park behind the Metropolitan Government Offices buildings, then went back to the hotel. Bought some sushi and some orange juice, ate, went back to bed thinking that this trip had not been much fun to date.
I woke up this morning with a headache, resolved to enjoy myself more today than I did yesterday. It didn’t last long. The mob scene at Shinjuku station continued well into the morning, my agoraphobia cranked up to 11, not helped by my feeling of complete helplessness. I made my way to the TIC in a non-descript office building by Yurakucho station on the Yamanote line (which I walked by twice because I was too stupid to look up — more on this later, too), and with the help of the staff up there I booked my hotels for the rest of the trip, which kind of took a load off my mind (relatively speaking, I mean). It was a relief to be able to communicate meaningfully with people without having to resort to pantomime or broken English or Japanese, and I think I would happily stayed there all morning if I could have thought of other things to say.
Hunger kicked in while I was at the TIC so I went to find a place for lunch. Hah. I don’t know if it’s jet lag, my lingering illness, or the fact that I’m a culinary racist, but every time I think about eating food I get incredibly nauseous. This is going to sound infantile, but: Every food establishment I’ve been in or near has kicked out this awful smell, a combination of smoke, food, and something else (quite possibly cologne) that makes my stomach turn inside out. I can’t figure out what anything is in any of the menus, and the plastic displays don’t help. They don’t look delicious, they look gross. I’m prepared to acknowledge this bias in myself for now, but I wonder if maybe this isn’t a self-perpetuating problem: I’m not eating beacuse I don’t feel good, and I don’t feel good because I’m not eating. So I’m trying to get some source of exogenous glucose into me (bananas are good and taste the same everywhere in the world, even if the ones in Japan come wrapped in a hermetically-sealed plastic bag). But I’m trying to think about what I should do for dinner — I know, intellectually, that I need to eat something considering my last substantial meal was on the airplane almost a day and a half ago — and the idea is so wholly unappealing I’m getting nauseous all over again.
I was told, before I left, that I’d learn lots about myself. Philip once wrote that the reason to travel was not so much to understand other people but to understand yourself better, and I’m sort of seeing that except I’d argue that I’m not learning anything good. I need to understand the world around me and be able to make sense of it; Tokyo is understandable on an inanimate, if huge, scale, but when you throw the 22 million people into the mix it becomes incomprehensible to an outsider. I suppose for some tourists that might be part of its charm, but it drives me up the wall. Combined with the aforementioned agoraphobia I am extremely uneasy being in this city even though intellectually I know I have nothing to worry about — because I don’t understand it. Also, I feel like a minority here in a way I never have back home (probably because I am a minority here in a way that I am not back home), and so every interaction I have with people in my broken Japanese seems almost pity-inducing — never mind the stares I get on the street. The giant gaijin wandering around lost, staring at the ticket machines.. it goes on and on and on.
I’m aware at how childish this is going to sound, but I’m hilariously homesick. I feel alone and isolated here — I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more alone or isolated in my life — and it’s made worse by the fact that I feel sick, and can’t communicate with the zillions of people around me. Every time I want to go somewhere it’s a huge chore, because I have to haul out maps and match up kanji characters and drag out a compass, and even then I still manage to get lost. Because I can’t find anything reliably, I end up having to backtrack a lot: I went for a ride on the subway to Kasumigaseki station (there’s a reason for this, more on it at a later date) after visiting the MGA observation tower. I came back to Shinjuku on a different line than the one I went out on, which dropped me in a different part of the station. And I was screwed — I had no idea where I was going, there was no signage, and no one to ask. So I ended up having to walk all the way back to the MGA offices; I can find my way back to the hotel from there. It’s like this everywhere. I was ecstatic to realize that the adapter plug I brought from Canada works OK in my hotel room, because the idea of having to find anything in Akihabara was just that depressing (I haven’t been there yet, tomorrow, probably).
I sincerly hope this phase passes, that it’s just culture shock coupled with jet lag, because I really don’t think I can take 15 more days of this. No, that’s not right: I know I can’t take 15 more days of this. I know it sounds like I’m whining, and maybe I am, but the reality is that I’m about this close to saying “I hate this place.” The fun/sucks ratio of this trip is tilted sorrily in the direction of “sucks” right now, and if it doesn’t get any better I don’t know what I’ll do.
I’m going to finish this up and then go dock hallie at the business center downstairs so I can send if off, and maybe find something to eat tonight that won’t make me nauseous. My body’s still way out of whack — it’s 16:30 here right now, 00:27 on the west coast, and I have no idea what time I think it is but I’m tired — so it’s likely I’ll be going to bed early tonight. Probably watch a movie I brought with me, read some more of the New Yorker. Try to get some sleep, and start tomorrow with a reasonably full day planned. Don’t know what I’ll do, but I hope it’s more interesting than today was.
NB: This happened Tuesday. It would have been posted then, but I had about ten minutes worth of not running when I finally made it to YVR, which wasn’t really enough time to yank out the computer and type. I have fudged the timestamp accordingly, but have no idea what LJ is going to do to it. Also, I am continuing to have problems with emacs even though I have an honest-to-god IP connection right now, so stayed tuned to this location.
It turns out that the smartest thing I did all day was bring my cell phone.
I had toyed briefly with the idea of leaving my sexy new phone at home. After all, it doesn’t work in Japan and even if it did Telus would charge me ass-raping rates to roam. I made arrangements with Vodafone over the weekend to rent a phone while I was in Japan — pick it up, and drop it off, at Narita. So why bring my own? So I could call people from the airport in Vancouver during my long long layovers? Sure, that made sense. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to the fact that I find being with my phone unpalatable, I brought it along with me. Fully charged, the battery should hold out two weeks if I don’t turn it on, and really, how much calling would I be doing during the layover? YVR has 802.11b. I don’t need CDMA access.
Yeah, not so much.
The past couple of days have seen dense, thick fog descend over Victoria during the late afternoon and evening. I left J.’s house in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and we could see whisps of fog floating over Esquimalt; driving home, I could see it sitting out over the harbor. I went out around 18:30 last night to run some last-minute errands and my car’s headlight beams were visible as I drove down my street. When I went to bed, Victoria was socked in.
A warning sign?
You tell me.
When you get to the airport and discover, among other things, a very long lineup and many hoarse Air Canada employees, and that you cannot see the terminal building, you start to get a little antsy. I wasn’t worried — I build my flight schedules with enough flexibility in them to allow for this kind of screwup. After losing one too many bags in a short connection, I have resigned myself to inhabiting airport departure lounges waiting for other flights. Hey, I’m smart; I know how to deal.
What I hadn’t counted on was Air Canada announcing that all flights out of Victoria were cancelled. Until noon. At 08:15, staring 9+ hours of air travel in the face, I stood in the check-in hall at Victoria International Airport and contemplated my next move. First, call back my ride. M. was good as his word and flipped back around the airport to pick me up. (I had, in a fit of silliness, said, “Just drop me off; I’m running a little late, and I’ll be fine.” Hah! Famous last words.) Next, shag the numbers for both Harbour Air and Helijet and start making calls. Helijet had departures, but they were booked solid. Harbour Air didn’t have anything — the fog was affecting them, too. (I paused briefly to consider how, exactly, fog can affect Harbour Air but not Helijet, given they operate less than a kilometer apart — Ogden Point’s weather isn’t dramatically different from that at the foot of Wharf Street.) That left one option only.
I’ll bet you know where this is going.
This would explain why my journey of a couple thousand miles and half a world away started with me standing in the departure lounge at the goddamn ferry terminal, my cell phone glued to my ear. Regular readers know how much I thoroughly hate the ferries; starting a trip to the other side of the planet by riding the big white boat was a proposition that oscillated between stupid and enraging. Maybe the only way this could have been dumber might have been if I hitchhiked out to the airport.
Meanwhile, I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with JAL. The Japanese — or JAL’s customer service representatives at least — I’m sorry to say, have made passive-aggressiveness into a fine art. The representative was sympathetic, but ultimately unhelpful: She took my name (maybe the only time in North America I haven’t had to spell it over the phone), my cell phone number, and said, “I’ll pass a message along to the airport staff, but it won’t do anything.” What are my choices if I don’t make this flight? “You’ll have to talk to the airport staff about that.” Can I get my seat assignment now, so I’m not fighting for one of the three middle seats on the 747 (which is inevitably what’s going to happen)? “No, you’re too late for that.”
I felt a hate crime coming on. The problem was, I didn’t know who the victim was going to be. Even more infuriating was that I couldn’t be mad at anyone: I’m used to being enraged when I travel, and I’m used to hurling invective at opportune targets (never the customer service people, you understand, only the supervisors). This incident having involved Air Canada, I was working up a good head of anger — as I said the other day, Air Canada always seems to find new and amazing ways to piss me off — but then realized there was no point. Who am I going to get mad at? The runway was below minima. It’s not like they planned it this way or anything. So far as I know, anyway.
The high point of this otherwise miserable day came when I went into the bathroom on the ferry. On the back of the door was a sign about not throwing stuff in the toilet (because these toilets have a tendency to clog, being marine toilets and all). The sign has a big black hole on it and it said something to the effect of “this is how big the pipe is.” Someone had graffiti’d the thing. The end effect?
Goatse.
I categorically refuse to speculate as to why this cheered me up.
But it did.
A fuller, more complete accounting of the events of the past 24 hours will have to wait until I am somewhere with a proper Internet connection but: JAL economy class sucks, the this-place-has-no-street-names problem that Tokyo has is vastly underrated, and 6.0 earthquakes are absolutely no damn fun at all.
The hotel PA is system is busy making announcements of which I only understand every fourth or fifth word (and those words seem to be “please” and “thank you”). I am trying to decide whether I want to try going back to bed or not.
I suppose there is another way to look at it: this is as authentic a Japanese experience as I can have without, you know, going back in time.
Is this an omen? Is God trying to tell me something? Or am I just that unlucky?
Note: Cross-posted to Under A Blackened Sky.
I spent most of yesterday scouring the net looking for hotels. Yes, I am aware that it isn’t that big a deal, that I’ll be able to find a place to stay thanks to the fine folks at the JNTO, but it’s still a worrying thing. My entire professional life is predicated on dealing with problems and being, essentially, a type A++ control freak, so leaving these sorts of things to chance is never a positive thing, nor is it something that’s likely to result in happiness and mental well-being. In the end, I managed to find a place to stay in Himeji and Nagasaki — which leaves Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Fukuoka for when I hit Tokyo tomorrow. Well, Wednesday. Whenever that happens, I mean.
Speaking of Miyajima — that typhoon last month? Yeah, it apparently damaged Itsukushima shrine. Itsukushima and Miyajima have been more or less the highlight of my trip that doesn’t involve drinking booze in class bars. The Miyajima tourist people are saying that repairs are ongoing and that they hope to re-open the shrine to the public by mid-October; cross your fingers and hope that “mid-October” really means “before the 17th.”
Bedtime now. Up at 0600, airport by 0800, YVR by 0930.
Nighty night.