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.