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Published: December 11th 2008
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Living in a box
am I living in a cardboard box Tokyo, well, where to start? 8:30 sushi? Love hotels? Plastic food? Electro/Jazz fusion? Pretty boy ‘hosts’? Guitar hero arcades? Best just start at the beginning I guess!
We arrived late in the evening, in the rain, and leapt straight in with our first capsule hotel experience. A very odd experience it was too, from the slightly seedy entrance to the dark dorm rooms full of people in the pyjamas provided for you at reception, who were just sitting around in the gloom, faces lit by the glow of the small pay TVs in each capsule or the occasional laptop screen. Most capsule hotels do not admit women and the ones that do have a separate ladies floor as apparently it is too dangerous for ladies to share a room full of Japanese businessmen who have missed their last train home. After a night of sleep disturbed by people snoring inside plastic boxes and Claire getting bitten all over by some kind of insect, we were out early the next day and checked into a nice hotel.
It was a Sunday in Tokyo, so we went down to Yoyogi Park to see the kids in their dress up outfits. It
Tokyo by (rainy) night
Glad we bought clear umbrellas we'd have seen nothing otherwise! was still raining and so the walk through the backstreets we had planned was not as exciting as it might have been, although the architecture was a real mix of styles ages and scale. All the main streets were bedecked with flags proclaiming Tokyo as a candidate city for the Olympics in 2016, which we found quite amusing.
We reached the park and the persistent rain passing through the dense canopy of trees that cover its entirety had left it with an atmospheric, almost spooky mist along its broad shaded paths. We finally found the area the ‘freaks’ hang out in but unfortunately (possibly fortunately) they had all been moved on by a massive dance competition. Hundreds of dancers in brightly coloured costumes were performing a combination of traditional and modern dance on massive stages (think Notting Hill Carnival but on stages instead of floats and nobody getting stabbed) all in competition with each other. It was a quite staggering spectacle and although we didn’t really understand what was going on, the excitement of each group of performers coupled with the obvious amount of hard work that had gone into each routine and costume was quite infectious and we
Tokyo Fish Market
I know octopus are not fish strictly speaking but they are the quintessential Japanese eating experience! found ourselves dancing along a bit and having a jolly good time indeed!
The rain continued to dampen the spirits a little though and we had to move on earlier than we would have liked to find some shelter. As our time in Tokyo was short we headed out in the torrential evening rain to find Roppongi and some of the famous Tokyo nightlife. We found it; it was OK, not as glitzy as we had anticipated it being. Perhaps it was just because it was a wet night, perhaps it was just because it was a Sunday, but there was not a lot going on. Disappointed was not the word.
An early start the following day took us to Tokyo fish market for an assault on all our senses and a test of our reflexes. I’ve seen a few fish in my time but there were so many I just didn’t recognize - the range and colours of the super fresh fish was just astounding. As we wandered around the vast market dodging speeding delivery trucks and brightly painted handcarts and listening to the cries of the vendors and the sounds of the benchsaws cutting massive frozen
Man and machine
in modulated sound harmony. tuna we realized we were hungry, so we stopped for a massive plate of Sushi so fresh it was still wriggling (well almost) and Claire managed to enjoy a big bowl of tuna sashimi even though it was only 8 o’clock in the morning!
A trip to tourist info office for details of trains and gigs took us to the central government building, a massive structure built before the economic bubble burst with no expense spared for the 10,000 civil servants working within. Whilst waiting for the free internet machines we were offered a tour of the building by one of the many volunteers that give up their time to help pretty much anyone all over Japan. Visits to working floors and many (very dull to most people) construction questions later we arrived at the top floor viewing platform for some glorious (if a little wet - it was still raining) panoramic views of the city.
As it was a Monday our gig search did not lead us to too many places so it was back to Roppongi and a club called Super Deluxe for an evening of ‘experimental music’. We arrived on London time (i.e. fashionably late) only
Neon
Tokyo at its sparkly neon brightest! to discover we had missed half of it as the Japanese don’t do late. We caught a chap playing with some sound modulators and a chaos pad though (very cool) and a nine piece band doing Japanese deconstructionist jazz poetry. We couldn’t understand what they were saying obviously, but from the reactions of the rest of the assembled crowd they were pretty bad! Much embarrassed laughter all around. Got chatting to some westerners and it turned out they were the owners, so we had a couple of beers and felt quite cool for once (James, I got his number if you are interested in doing a couple of nights in Japan!)
A slight miscalculation on our part meant our hotel had no room for us the following evening so we spent the day shopping on plastic food street before booking into a slightly better capsule hotel for the night. Plastic food street is just that, pretty much every restaurant has a window display full of mainly incredibly realistic plastic versions of all the food on offer - everything from bowls of ramen to octopus limbs and half eaten roast ducks - plastic food street is where you will find them, as well as just about everything you need to open a restaurant. It’s easy enough to find as there’s a 10 foot chefs head at the top of the street and more pottery and laquerwear shops than you can shake a chopstick at. Several purchases later we returned to our capsules in Shinjuku and discovered the Tokyo you see in pictures. The bright lights were bright, the backstreets were dark and every street corner had a small crowd of pretty boy ‘hosts’ with identikit fake tans, glitzy suits and bleached hair. An evening playing Guitar Hero in the numerous arcades and swigging Asahi was thoroughly enjoyed (especially by Dan as he won every time!) Just as we ‘found’ the Tokyo we had been looking for it was time to leave. As the weather had been so bad it was not a good time to climb Mount Fuji as we had planned so we spent the following day in Hiroshima instead.
Another rainy day gave the A-bomb dome even more atmosphere - we all know what happened so we won’t go into details, but to read the first hand accounts of the day itself and the aftermath for those both there and employed in the ‘clean up’ really left us shocked and in awe of the strength of the Japanese people in dealing with such an apparently avoidable atrocity with such dignity and courage. We moved on to Osaka that evening with much food for thought.
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