Baseball Prospectus authors sometimes resort to what they call “Bullet Point Day” when they’ve got lots ot talk about but no way to link everything together. Today is one of those days — a good day, a productive day, but I’m really spent, and I don’t have the patience I need to weave a coherent narrative together (to the extent that other postings have been coherent narratives, I mean). So, as Will Carroll says, powered by Pocari Sweat, on to today’s update…

Like Northern Exposure, only, you know, without the moose. And Alaska. And the weird people. Nara’s a neat place. Beyond the fact that it was Japan’s first real capital city (previously, the capital changed every time the emporer died) and saw the birth of Japan’s organic culture and is home to a giant freakin’ statute of Buddha in the biggest wooden structure in the world, what Nara is known for is its deer. There are thousands of deer that roam Nara park, and they’re incredibly tame. Which is to say they’re pushy. You can buy “deer cookies” for Y150 from vendors all over the park, and the deer will come and eat them out of your hand. The deer are very cute, especially the baby deer, and I had lots of fun taking pictures of cute children and cute deer this afternoon. (At right: “Do not anger the cartoon deer!”)

Unfortunately, once you feed one deer, they all figure out you have food, and you’re screwed. They are very, very pushy. They’re like certain dogs I know (I’m not naming names, you understand, but she has opposable paws), only worse, because they don’t understand “down” and “no.” They might understand the local variants, but I don’t know “down” in Japanese and shouting “Iie!” at them didn’t seem to work. Several of them thought I might have more deer cookies in my pockets, and took to nibbling at my pants. Many people seemed to be wary of deer (as they damn well should be) and, once they discovered how pushy they can be, simply threw the cookies at the deer and ran. Which is, as I’m sure you know, stupid — because a deer can outrun you without really breaking a sweat. This is, as you might expect, more or less what happened, and thus I had the highly enjoyable time of watching young Japanese girls being chased by deer in search of treats. (At left: “Do not make the cartoon deer jealous!”)

The deer in Nara Park are an interesting study in wildlife control. Because deer are considered sacred in Shinto (they’re supposed to be messengers of the gods) they have to be protected. Canadians, by contrast, see a pest problem that is best solved with ammunition and guns. Paul, I don’t know if you’re reading this, but I thought of you often today while wandering around and pushing the pesky buggers away. (No antlers on these guys, though.)

It sure would suck if Lyme disease ever decided to pop up in Nara. Man, that would be a pain in the ass.

There’s a famous path in Kyoto, on the eastern edge of the city, called the Philosopher’s Walk. It starts up north, around Ginkakuji, the Temple of the Silever Pavillion, and meanders along a canal until you reach Nanzen-ji in the south. It’s not a very long walk, though if you stop in at all the sights along the way it can be very long indeed. I have no idea who named it the Philosopher’s Walk (none of my books have any information as to the origins of that term, though I’m guessing it has something to do with, um, philosophers wandering around the canal), but, having done the southern half of the trip, it seems like a very nice walk indeed.

I got up early this morning to change hotels and visit the Imperial Palace. You have to make reservations in advance to get there; mine were made last month, and are free. It was a painless procedure and I highly recommend it — you get a ticket you print out, with a bar code, and they scan it and away you go. Apparently it’s also possible to do walk-ups and get on tours, but given the number of people I saw on mine this is not an approach I recommend. English tours are given twice a day, at 10:00 and 14:00. The upshot of this is that you will meet lots and lots of English-speaking people here — whether this is a net positive or not is an open question in and of itself. I ran into a couple from DC, a landscape architect and his wife, who were over doing some occupational travel (he was looking at gardens and said he was bored stiff). Nice people; we wandered around the Palace grounds, dawdling behind the main body of the tour, though his questions of me and my camera (he got the idea in his head I was a professional photographer, on assignment, I guess because I was carrying three lenses and burned through three rolls of film in his presence) regarding him and his camera made me think that perhaps more people should read instruction manuals and/or take a basic photography class. The middle of Kyoto during a busy tour group isn’t really the best time or place to go into an intricate discussion of depth of field, aperature priority timing, shutter speeds, and the virtues of program-AE (if you’re a brain-dead slob like me). I guess if you know your system inside and out, and use lens hoods, people really do think you’re a professional photographer. (Note that this would come back to bite me later in the day in a particularly dramatic way.)

The group was being lead by a small woman with a microphone — helpful, but kind of hard to hear. The tour, 50 minutes long by my watch, covers the main sights within the inner compound but unfortunately does not include the inside of any buildings. I’ve never been to Buckingham Palace so I don’t know how this tour compares, but I’d say it’s like being let inside the gates and told to stay on the path. But: You do get to visit the Emporer’s private garden, which was.. gorgeous isn’t the right word for it. This is one of the reasons why I burned through three rolls of film before 11:00 this morning. “Kawaii desu ne?” is a very useful phrase to remember when visiting gardens. I used it frequently today.

Had lunch at a cafeteria in the outer palace grounds, which have a serious pidgeon problem. Fat, lazy, and brave pidgeons dot the park — so lazy, in fact, they look dead until you walk right up to them, at which point they sort of loll over, regard you casually, and, in a huff, fluff their wings up and shift their weight around. At no point did any bird I challenged actually get up to move out of my way. Like the crows in Ueno Park, they seem to belong, but I think Hermes said it best: “Shoo! Get away, ya filthy bird!” They’re pidgeons. They’re airborne rats.

Kyoto is a very, very old city. The bits that are old are really old; my ryokan from Sunday night was located in what used to be the red light district — in the 17th century. (Alas, this sounds more interesting than it really is; there are markers that commemorate this fact and the events that occurred in and around the area, but they can be appreciated by an English-speaking person only in the abstract since the descriptions and explanations are only in Japanese.) Owing to its cultural significance Kyoto was spared from Allied (read: American) bombing in WWII and so the concrete ugliness you see around town developed organically instead of being the result of 1950s reconstruction projects. Whereas Tokyo’s concrete is sometimes interesting, Kyoto’s concrete is generally pretty blah. Kyoto makes up for it with roughly a zillion other things.

One of the nicest old things in the city is the Heian Shrine (Heian-jingu), out towards the Philosopher’s Walk. From a distance you can see the huge orange torii looming over the street; up close, it’s even more impressive. The shrine itself is another 500 meters up the street, even though the torii itself is considered the entrance to the place. Brilliant shades of vermillion and green shine down on you from every structure; on super bright days (like today was, at times), these can combine with the shrine’s white gravel to create dizzying effects — one which requires good sunglasses to fully appreciate. You can walk around the shrine’s buildings for free, and, just like at Meiji-jingu in Tokyo, it is a real shrine that’s suitable for making offerings and prayers. The real treat to Heian-jingu, though, costs Y600 and is off to the side of the main building.

Now, let me say first that I am not a garden person. I live in a city with an internationally famous garden but, much to the amusement of my out of town friends, have never been. Roughly half of the people I meet while traveling who find out I’m from Victoria ask me about Butchart, and I can almost always get a laugh out of them by saying that “I’m sure it must be nice, but I’ve never actually been.” On the basis of what I did today, wandering around Kyoto, perhaps I should open the wallet and fork out for the trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, ’cause that’s how I spent my afternoon. 90 minutes in Heian-jingu’s gardens flew by, along with another two rolls of film. I actually switched to black and white at one point because I wanted to save the color stuff for later in the day. You can read a bit more about Heian-jingu’s gardens over here; the text doesn’t really do it justice, I’m afraid, and you’ll just have to wait for my pictures.

Toyo had said that Nanzen-ji was within walking distance of Heian-jingu. “Sure,” I had replied, somewhat snidely. “Everything’s within walking distance if you have lots of time.” But it turns out that Nanzen-ji really is within easy walking distance; Kyoto, for a city of 1.2 million people, is remarkably compact, without a lot of the obvious density that comes with packing that many people that tightly. This may be the result of Tokyo having inured me to crowds, and after yesterday’s madhouse I may be beyond caring at this point. But curiously this place feels about a million times smaller, and more intimate, than Tokyo. Which may just be a testament to Tokyo’s hugeness. I don’t know. Anyway, point being: If you want to see the interesting things in Okazaki (biologists and biochemists will think a street named Okazaki-dori is funny; the rest of you won’t care), or any other close region of Kyoto, it’s worth walking between sites. Trust me on this.

Nanzen-ji is up on a hill, a little bit like Kiyomizu-dera, but not as high up, and not nearly as crowded at 15:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s also not nearly as kitchy, either. Nanzen-ji is one of those really really old places in Kyoto; it started life in 1264 as a detached palace for Kameyama and in 1291 became a Zen temple. Several smaller sub-temples and gardens have sprung up around the place; I stopped in to Konchi-in, founded by one of Nanzen-ji’s priests sometime during the 1400s. During the 17th century (roughly 1620 to about 1637 or so, from what I can tell), Kobori Enshu designed an eight-window tea room that is considered the best in Kyoto, and an absolutely goregous garden with a hugely evocative name (“Crane and Turtle”). There’s apparently a lot about these gardens that I don’t understand; the sign outside talks about the representative nature of various elements, and I suppose if you squint just right you could sort of see where Kobori was going (don’t hold your breath). They can, however, be appreciated on a purely abstract level regardless of your aesthetic sensibilities, and, indeed, you should see them for that reason. Anyway, the Crane and Turtle garden is a very nice place, with a couple of spots to sit down and rest.

As for the temple itself.. you have to lose your shoes at the entry way. Take a tip from me and don’t even try to put them on where you’ll have to walk on wood; you’ll get scolded. Nanzen-in is a middling garden off to the south of the main temple; I saw it for the sake of completeness, but thought Konchi-in was much nicer (not to mention larger). Not all parts of the temple are open on all days; today, when I visited, only the Abbot’s residence was open to the public (Y500 and this is where you lose your shoes). They do offer slippers, which, of course, didn’t fit my feet so the effect is less walking and more shuffling. As I said, Kyoto is an old, old city with old, old things in it, and you get a profound sense of history walking down darkened hallways, peering into rooms that look out onto gardens and the city below, and think about what it must have been like to live and work here.

I stopped for a breather and to let my shirt dry out a bit. Refreshed with a bottle of Pocari Sweat (seriously: Best. Drink. Name. Ever.), I walked back down the hill and popped in to Muran-an, one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it places on the walk up towards Nanzen-ji. A hermitage built in 1894, the garden is (like the one at Heian-jingu) considered representative of gardens from the Meiji era. I’d call this a hidden jem; none of my guidebooks have anything to say about it though it is on one map.

Somewhere during this time my exposure compensation dial got set to +2. I remember thinking it was kind of strange to be working with ISO 800 film in shade, in the middle of the afternoon, and getting shutter/aperture combinations that looked an awful lot like 60/5.6 and — at one point — 20/3.5. WTF? I’m blaming the dehydration for my not having caught this sooner; I cringed when I caught this, having wondered exactly how long that much compensation had been dialed in (probably some time after Heian-jingu, since I remember deliberately underexposing a couple of frames of people walking across a wooden bridge for dramatic effect) and how many pictures might be wrecked as a result. (The answer, in case you’re curious, is probably going to turn out to be “between a handful and none” — having spent almost the entire day working with color negative film, which is extremely tolerant of over- and under-exposure, coupled with my lab, will be the things that save me.)

This problem fixed, I walked down to Shoren-in, my final stop for the day. I’d been on the go for six hours already and though I probably could have come back up this way on Thursday after presumably going back to Kiyomizu, (a) I didn’t know that for sure and (b) I’m not even certain I’ll make it back to Kiyomizu. Toyo seemed insistant that I go to Shoren-in if I wanted to see really good gardens, and I’m glad she did; I get the impression it’s a little off the beaten path, since most people in that area seem to head for Kodai-ji and Chion-in. Based on the near-total lack of English signage to explain anything, it would seem that it isn’t popular with the tourists. Which is fine with me. Shonen-in was originally the home of the chief Abbot of Tendai, back in 1895. Of course, looking at this now, I realize that I was five minutes from the aforementioned Chion-in, which is the home of my nominal school of Buddhism and so I probably should have kept going south. D’oh!

But that was enough. Seven hours of sightseeing, with what will probably work out to be about ten kilometers walked over the course of the day, is enough to tax anyone. I hopped a bus heading back to Kyoto station and nearly fell asleep on the ride. My shirt was soaked through and sweat-stained (thank god for black shirts, where it’s hard to tell). Showered, rinsed out the shirt, hung it up to dry, and.. went back out. I needed food and I had to visit the post office.

See, back on Sunday night, I managed to break one of my three pairs of pants. What happened was that I was in the bathroom, and I sat down, and something went “pop!” and the teeth of the zipper had pulled right out of the fabric. I was amazingly pissed about this, not only because these were $65 pants from MEC but also because they happened to be convertible pants that I was using as shorts to beat the unseasonable heat in Kyoto. Unwilling to abandon the pants in Japan over something so trivial, but equally unwilling to pack them around for the remainder of the trip (I really need the space), I elected instead to pack them up and send them home. Courier would have been nice, but FedEx wanted nearly $200 to send it back. So off to the post office I went, with a box, a long-sleeved t-shirt I never wear at home (never mind here), and a couple of pairs of socks I doubt I’ll need — things I can live with losing, but would rather not just throw out, if you know what I mean. They were accepted, and I waved bye-bye, wondering how long it would be before I would see them again (probably a month).

On the way to the Imperial Palace was today’s Humor Moment. At Gojo station a gaggle — and I really do mean a gaggle, since there were at least 30 of them — of Japanese schoolkids got on, lead by a very harried looking teacher with a megaphone (who looks kind of like my old dentist did when he was younger). I have no idea where they were going, but they couldn’t have been much more than about seven or eight, and rambunctious in the way seven or eight year-olds on a field trip are (the moreso when those seven or eight year-olds are traveling on public transportation). I was sitting in the corner of the car when they noticed me, and, no word of a lie, I must have been the most interesting thing they’d seen.. well, definitely all day, and judging by the amount of high-pitched chattering I’m guessing in a long, long time. It’s entirely possible I was the first foreigner they’d ever seen up close and personal, and within moments of their arrival in the car I was surrounded by ten of them, all jabbering at me in high-pitched Japanese.

One brave boy sat down next to me and began to speak slowly, the way I would imagine Japanese people talk to retarded kids. I managed to pick out him asking me, “Nihon-jin desu ka?” I shook my head. “Iie. Canada kara kimashita.” Well. If the sight of a gaijin sitting on a train was something remarkable, the prospect of one that might speak a little Japanese was enough to send these kids into paroxysms of delight. The tone and pitch and speed of the rapid-fire Japanese increased, and I was forced to dig through my memory to find Nihongo sukoshi dekimasu, which really only made it worse. One of them figured out that my hair was spiky, and that if they poked at it they’d find it was stiff, so they took turns poking at it (spiky hair apparently being unknown to Japanese schoolkids who are lacking in older siblings with bad habits to imitate). The advice I got from relatives back home was right — pretend like you don’t speak any Japanese at all, because otherwise be prepared for the firehose of comprehension. Hah! You have no idea!

The best part, though, was when I stood up to get off at my stop. “Sumimasen,” I said, slowly and clearly (this is, like, the most useful phrase for a tourist). I towered over them. The tallest kid came about 3/4 of the way up my leg. They stared up at me and then began to squeal with delight. My fan club realized what was happening, and began to wave; they seemed kind of disappointed. Their teacher caught me eye and smiled, mouthing, “Arigato gozaimasu“; this was the one time where do itashimashite is actually an appropriate response. There wasn’t much else I could have done; everyone is going to humor these kids, not kick them in the shins. Robert Young Pelton says you should travel in strange places with mementos from home to pass out to people, and a part of me really wishes I’d had something I could have passed out. Canadian flag stickers would have been awesome, but another part of me thinks that’s just condescending crap.

This underscores an interesting point that I thought about today. One of the reasons I’ve felt kind of isolated is because I don’t trust my Japanese skills enough to get around. Sure, I can buy things, and order food (if I have pictures to look at, or something to point to) and I even managed to mail a parcel this evening in pantomime. And I can ask for directions and even sort of understand the reply I get. But that’s about it. Without pictures, or a writing surface, I’m screwed. I get happy when I find things in English that I can understand (or Engrish, as the case may be, where I can guess). But then I think about Japanese tourists that come to Canada — they don’t expect us to be conversant in their language. I suppose they get a little thrill when they discover the desk staff at the Banff Springs speaks Japanese, or when they find a Japanese menu in the restaurant there, but it’s not expected. I’m not saying I expect it here, either, but eigo no menyu ga arimasu ka? sounds like a pleading. Tourists in Canada don’t go around asking everyone they meet “Excuse me, do you speak Japanese?”; I start most conversations that I expect to be complicated with the local equivalent of that phrase. The bus system has announcements in Japanese and English, at least for the important stops; you would never, in a thousand years, expect the same kind of thing to happen in a Canadian city. Even during the Olympics, I distinctly remember the only multilingual concession made by the city was to put “Olympic Plaza – Place Olympique” on the glass at that stop. The announcements weren’t even in French, or any other language for that matter. I can’t be the only person who thinks this is strange.

Yet I’m sure there’s more than a handful of tourists who come to Kyoto — as foreign-tourist friendly a city as you’re going to find in Japan — and who complains about the lack of English signage. Do the Japanese resent having to listen to announcements twice? Do restaurants resent having to print English menus? Do clerks resent being pestered to work in a language they’re not familiar with? I don’t know. I can’t tell. And it makes me a little uneasy.

So how’d my first night in a ryokan go? Pretty well, all things considered, though if I had to describe it in a short-handed way it’s a lot like being at camp. (This was probably due to the low-budget nature of the place.) Without any furniture to clutter up a room you have much more space to spread out, and bare rooms are so much more idealy suited for tatami than, say, western-style furniture. The air conditioner was damn near nuclear powered, which was very nice, given the humidity problems I mentioned yesterday. There’s probably a trick to laying out the futon that I haven’t figured out yet, given that I think there was a crease in a particularly unpleasant spot last night. Pillows are hard, bead-filled things. Also, if you’re over six feet tall, you might want to give second thoughts to staying in a ryokan — the futon is not six feet long, and though it wasn’t a problem for me, most of the night, you might not like sleeping with your knees drawn up.

I managed to wake up stiff and cramped, with a bad kink in my neck. Nothing a shower won’t fix, right? Wrong. Bathing at ryokan is a night affair, and I didn’t partake last night because of an unavailability of towels. (Sponge-style baths in the sink aren’t the same thing.) Talking to some people here, it turns out that bathing in the morning is considered a little.. well, odd. Anyway, thanks to my versatile hairstyle, you couldn’t tell. Hooray for intentionally messy hair! (See, nay-sayers? It has a purpose.)

Toyo picked me up. Together we found my new hotel and dropped my bags off. She was unimpressed. “It’s really out of the way,” she said. Not significantly worse than Shinjuku, but not appreciably better, either, especially with the bus situation taken into consideration. “It doesn’t seem very nice.” She could tell I was decidedly non-plussed about the whole thing, too, so it took about ten minutes for me to decide that I was going to look for a new place to stay. As it turns out, my first choice in Kyoto — a hotel that is much nicer and much more convenient and comes with multiple positive recommendations — has room, starting tomorrow night, so I booked myself in. Hotels are tight everywhere right now; it’s Health and Sports Day today. Ostensibly it’s a statutory holiday, which is why I couldn’t do the Imperial Palace today, but that and the post office are about the only things that are closed; everything else is open, and with good reason — the Japanese seem to love traveling on their stat days. Nao made some kind of sarcastic comment last night about it being a “nonsensical” holiday and she’s probably got a point except that who am I to judge? Today’s Thanksgiving back in Canada — the second Monday of the month is a holiday at home, too — and I can sort of see how pointless a holiday that would seem to someone who wasn’t Canadian, too.

(Still, you have to admire my timing. Earthquake, typhoon, statutory holiday.. I found out there’s a huge matsuri in Himeji while I’m there, which is both good news and bad. Good news, in the sense that there’ll be something interesting to go look at that night; bad, in the sense that there will be a lot of people in town.)

As I said last night, Toyo is almost as bad as my grandmother. “You need to eat when you travel,” she told me after finding out that I hadn’t had breakfast. “You should know better.” She’s right; I do know better, but I also know that I rarely if ever eat breakfast at home and don’t see why this should be any different. Nao fed me leftover pancakes; Toyo brought fruit. “Itadakimasu.” Oh, all right, fine.. Heyyy! Mandarin oranges two months ahead of schedule! Score. (PS: They’re way better over here. The stuff we get back home.. there’s no contest.)

Kiyomizu-dera is one of the most famous temples in all of Japan, and one of the places I really really wanted to see during my time in Kyoto. It was founded in 798 and rebuilt in 1633 by Tokugawa Iemitsu and sits on a stunningly beautiful spot on Mount Otowa. Nominally devoted to the goddess of mercy and compassion (good guidance for those of us in the healing arts) Kiyomizu attracts legions of tourists more because of its stunning views than because of its religious significance. Me, I wanted to see it because it’s famously photogenic.

Toyo and I drove up about halfway. It was unbelievably crowded, probably too crowded to really enjoy it properly, thanks to the combination of the aforementioned stat holiday and the general popularity of the site: I’m coming to the conclusion that although I got very nice pictures of Kyoto below, and of some of the buildings, if I really want to photograph the temple properly, and if I want to experience the place the right way, I’m going to have to go back first thing in the morning one day this week. (The temple opens at 6:00 which makes it a perfect trip for anyone who flies into KIX, spends their first night in Kyoto, and is up that early with jet lag.) My guidebook notes, with barely concealed sorrow, that “some people” may be put off by the overly commercial feel of the place. I can’t really disagree — the temple’s surroundings have a very kitchy feel to them, with lots of souvenir shops and vendors hawking their wares. It’s a neat place, though, and I certainly do want to go back — maybe Thursday morning, before I leave for Himeji.

It was while leaving Kiyomizu that the day’s most sickening event occurred. We were about to get into the car and I needed a free hand — my EOS was in my right hand, with the strap wrapped around my wrist a couple of times; my digital camera was in my left hand. I went to extract my hand from the EOS strap and.. clunk. The digital camera somehow had gone from “in left hand” to “hanging unsupported in mid-air.” I didn’t worry about the pictures; like most of you, I read that article about the durability of digital memory. But I worried about the optics and the CMOS sensor. Of course, I’d be remiss if I failed to point out the optics on most cheap digital cameras are actually made out of plastic, but whatever, it was a concern. I picked the camera up, shoved the batteries back in, and flipped it on.

No damage.

(I later discovered that one of the retaining clips that holds the battery compartment closed had broken off, so the little door is only held on one side. There’s a reason I brought a couple pieces of duct tape with me..)

Nao, Peter, and Toyo were going to Osaka in the afternoon so I bummed a ride with them downtown. Toyo pointed me in the direction of Takashimaya’s food floor, and we said our goodbyes. As I said yesterday, I’m going to be forever grateful for her hospitality and help on my first day and a bit here in Kyoto. (I also suspect I made promises I’m later going to resent having to keep, relating to things like Web site development and hosting, but what the hell, it keeps me sharp.) They boarded the Hankyu train to Osaka, and I went the other way, into Takashimaya.

Western department stores have nothing on their Japanese counterparts. I mean, seriously. Only a culture that was consumed with shopping in all of its myriad forms would have developed something as remarkable and as mind-blowing as the department stores here. The food floor, in the basement, is by far and away the best example of the mind-blowingness. I think the best way to describe it is to offer an analogy: Think of Eau Claire in Calgary, or Granville Island in Vancouver, or Fanieul Hall in Boston, or Pike Place in Seattle. Now compress it down into the size of a city block. Now double the amount and variety of food for sale. It’s a ridiculously cool place to hang out and wander around; you’ll see all kinds of strange things. It’s like.. Uwajimaya in Seattle, only better. Dozens of fish, out in the open, held up for the amusement of small children. Raw beef sliced so thin you can see through it (and priced so high you can’t afford it). Square citrus fruit. Fruit gift sets that cost in excess of $70. A hundred different kinds of boxed meals. A huge pile of fish roe with no sneeze guard. Back home, the sanitation requirements alone
would preclude this kind of market but this was easily the most interesting consumeristic experience I’ve had in years, anywhere.

Emeril’s been talking about “food of love” for years. I think he’s got it wrong — food is the language of love. Well, OK, a language of love. It’s universal. Maybe it’s because I’m a foodie that I reacted this way; I dunno. But it’s a blast. You must go.

Takashimaya’s food floor deserves special recognition because of the phenomenal French bakery shoehorned in a corner. Notwithstanding the novelty of being able to read signs and labels again (even if they were frequently spelled wrong — I didn’t know there was such a thing as pain au mie) the smell will drive you berzerk. There are plenty of carbohydrates available in Japanese cuisine but it’s mainly rice and noodles; bread doesn’t factor into the diet here the way it does in North America. And standing in front of a beautiful brioche, I realized exactly how much I had missed it. Complex carbohydrates! Starch! Bread! (I promise, M., that I will never make fun of your bread-eating habits ever again, even if it means I have to surrender my diabetes jokes.) I bought a half-dozen small cheese buns (Y180); they lasted about five minutes. OH-so-good. You have no idea. Best. Bread. Ever.

The rest of Takashimaya is mind-blowing, too, though perhaps not to the same degree. A stroll through the store revealed a half-dozen potential gifts for people back home. I found a giant DVD selection and thought about looking for certain people.. then realized it was a pointless exercise since, with notably few exceptions, these disks won’t play in North American players. Damn you, MPAA! (This evening, over dinner, I also realized that was likely a false problem, since the people for whom I would be buying DVDs are the same people who also happen to have de-region-encoded DVD players. But then there’s the issue of language..)

Two facets of my consumeristic side were sated today: Fashion-Whore Mike realized his wardrobe, while fashionable by North American standards, has absolutely nothing on Japanese fashion, especially in the formal-wear department. Wow. Next to this stuff, my suits look old and dated (practically ready for inclusion on That 90’s Show). I talked to a shirt-maker; in Brokenglish he explained that Japanese men prefer custom-made clothes. I have no idea whether he was right or not, but I know what I want.

Also, Pen-Whore Mike had a field day, though he limited himself to five new pens for himself, which were less than $5 all told, and far, far nicer than anything he’s seen back in Canada. He was going to buy a ceramic ball-point, but then realized how pointless that would be. (Ha ha! Ball-point pen technology joke.)

In the absence of a desk my preferred method of typing on a laptop keyboard is flat on my stomach, balanced on my elbows. This is hard on my shoulders and given their current state is probably not the best idea, but for the first time in my life I’m in a room where the floor is solid enough for a laptop to rest and yet comfortable enough to lie on without worrying about ventilation problems. So I’m going to take advantage of a tatami floor and write this way tonight.

Up early this morning and off to Tokyo station for the 9:36 train to Kyoto. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been looking forward to this part of the trip; I’ve been interested in the shinkansen for about as long as I’ve known about them. Anything that goes that fast on the ground is damn cool, and to a little kid obsessed with big, fast things, what better than a bullet train? I had planned to get to Tokyo about 40 minutes early, allowing for flex in the schedule and the inevitable screwups that come with my travels, so I could sit and watch the trains come in and out. Yeah, not so much. There wasn’t much to see, and there was nowhere to sit. Also, some genius put the designated smoking area next to the entrance to the non-smoking cars (for reasons that totally escape me), so it’s not like my time hanging around the platform was much fun. My curiosity managed to earn me a scolding from the JR platform manager, which turned out to be a good
thing in that it saved me from an inopportune encounter with a train coming from the other direction.

Anyway. Here’s everything that’s worth telling about shinkansen travel.

First off, they run on a hilariously rigorous schedule. For those of you with rail experience in Europe or eastern North America, this will come as a huge shock. The shinkansen network as a whole has an annual average lateness measured in seconds, and not that many seconds. When it says “the train will depart at 9:36,” the train leaves at 9:36 (according to the station clock; my watch is fast). When it says the train will arrive at 12:20, the train.. you know where this is going. So be on time, but not so on time you have time to kill.

Second, it’s a lot more like traveling on a plane than on any other kind of train. I’ve done scheduled rail service out east before, and this experience is more like flying than that. From the announcements, the in-seat service, and the seats themselves to the “please wait while we service your train in a high-speed manner” requests of the cleaning crew, I thought more about flying, say, WestJet than I did about riding Amtrak.

Third.. there is no third thing. It just seemed kind of pointless to write that way without having a third thing.

Helpful hints:

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, citrate^3- 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!

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):

1. The ticket machines will drive you batty. There’s a cheap and easy way to do it, but that involves fighting with two machines (the machine that sold you the ticket in the first place, and then the fare adjustment machine). Persist until you figure out how to get an iO/Passnet card (it only took me all day). Your life will be so much better.
2. 85% of the clubs in Shibuya and Shinjuku look vaguely dirty, even if they’re totally innocent.
3. Pictures of pachinko parlors do nothing to capture the sheer noise of the place. WCB would enforce hearing protection requirements. Also, there’s a lot of smoke.
4. When you walk into a store, restaurant, or even through a department store clerks will yell at you. They will continue to yell at you as you move through the store. Ignore them. The same goes for people on the street handing out flyers or packets of tissue — if you don’t want one, just ignore them, don’t try to be polite. “Iie, kekko desu” works, but then you get into a feedback loop (more on this in a later entry).
5. It is very very easy to scald yourself in a Japanese bathtub. Water temperatures run on the hot side. However, deep soaking tubs rule. There are few better ways to soothe an aching body than by throwing oneself into the tub. Yay hot baths.
6. If you are over ~5’8″, watch your head everywhere. Trust me. I learned this trying to get into my hotel room. Ow.
7. Do not lose your iO card, especially if it has more than about Y800 left on it. You’ll feel ridiculously stupid. (Also, you just blew $8.) I have no idea what happened to the first one I bought, which
   means it’ll probably turn up in a month when I’m back in Victoria.

8. For the agorophobe, Xanax would be good. Alcohol is better. “Sumimasen.. nan desu ka?” “Whiskey desu.” “Ah, so.” For relaxing times..
9. Vending machines are lots of fun. Try some of everything.
10. The Japanese have discovered an awesome cross between a pop-top can and a twist-open bottle. It’s so cool. I wish we had these back home. It’s an aluminum twist-open can. 355 ml of Coca Cola in a resealable container. Yay! (The first thing I bought in Japan was one of these, a can of Canada Dry.)

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.