Mike kicks a kid, so it's time to go

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After I went to bed on Saturday, Mitch and Mike ended up staying up pretty much all night. Mitch managed to get up on his own, but we had to wake Mike up. My first attempt to wake Mike up yielded no reaction.

Great. Mike's dead. What a downer. That's probably going to end the trip right there.

A second more forceful attempt sort of did the trick, but he went back to sleep immediately.

Mitch and I recovered in the lounge, and I found out that they had stayed up until 5am. Actually, Mike had fallen asleep in the lounge. Some other people who were just getting back from Shibuya (because they chose to stay out all night instead of trying to catch the last subway, which is an interesting proposition, and apparently pretty standard practice for a night out in Tokyo) and they woke him up so he finally went to bed at around 6.

It was going to be a tough day for Mike and Mitch, and it was looking like it was going to be a bit tough for me too. A bit of coffee, and some 7-11 breakfast food (mostly different kinds of fried chicken), and we were off to meet Yu at the Tokyo station.

Yu is a friend of a guy that I work with. They went to UBC together, and when my coworker heard I was going to Tokyo, he got us in touch. Yu kindly offered to show us around. So I was a bit ashamed that we were not in the best of shape when we went to meet him at 11am.

He was pretty understanding though.

Yu grew up in San Francisco, so his English is flawless, and his Japanese parents spoke Japanese at home, so his Japanese is flawless too. Lucky for us, he's moved back to Tokyo and doesn't mind showing around total strangers.

Yu took us through some of the key neighbourhoods in Tokyo. First we went through Roppongi, which is like the Fifth Avenue of Tokyo. There are a lot of expensive shops. Stuff none of us can afford. It's also the area where a lot of foreigners go for nightlife. And it's home to the Tokyo Tower, which is a smaller and less attractive clone of the Eiffel Tower. But you barely notice it because it's surrounded by taller buildings.

After that, Yu took us to one of the more famous Udon restaurants in town. We never would have found out about it on our own, and we were lucky enough to get a booth. I mean a Japanese style booth, with the door and the rice paper and everything. More like a private room. You also leave your shoes near the front of the restaurant in shoe lockers with wooden keys, but my shoes were a bit too big...

It was great having Yu to explain the ins and outs of Tokyo and Japanese culture. For the three us us, who'd done no research coming in, it was very informative.

It's well known that Japanese are hard working people, but apparently most do technically receive at least three weeks vacation a year. But culturally, no one takes three weeks off a year. It's a sign of devotion to your employer if you take less. I would not do well here.

And the masks that some people wear are not to keep themselves from getting sick, but to keep others from catching their illness. It's just another way of being polite.

There are also two subway/metro companies in Tokyo with their own set of lines. One's private and one's owned by the city. And if you buy a ticket for one system, you have to buy a new one when you change systems. We didn't know that, which is probably why we spent $10 in our first day. I guess nobody really likes it, and Yu expects that they'll be combined within a couple of years. He thinks people would prefer the private company because the fare is cheaper. That's a bit surprising. You'd expect the government owned one to be more subsidized or something.

We did a lot of walking, and went through Shibuya and Harajuku again, but this time Yu was able to point out the key sights. Shibuya is home to the busiest crosswalk in the world, and the busiest train station. Two million people pass through the train station every day! That's like all of Calgary and Edmonton going through the same train station every day. Insane...

In Harajuku, people apparently dress up on Sundays like anime characters, but we got there a bit late in the day and it seemed like we had missed them. All we saw were a group of hari krishnas singing and dancing on a street corner. So they have them here too...

We were pretty tired by this point, so we said thanks and goodbye to Yu and headed back to the hostel. On our way back to the hostel, we saw the Tokyo Tree Tower that Yu had mentioned. It's apparently taller than the CN tower and due to open in the spring. So much for that record, Toronto.

That was about all the sightseeing we could handle for the day, and we called it a night pretty early. The three of us needed a rest. Especially Mike.

Waking up refreshed, we were ready for another day of proper sightseeing. We headed back to the Sensoji temple in Asakusa, this time in the daylight. On our way, we passed the Ban-Dai museum, and after some quick "action satisfaction" we carried on. Looking at the Tokyo Tree Tower again, we could see the Asahi Brewery building next door (designed to look like a frothy beer glass... kind of) and the building next to it has what looks like a giant golden... turd on the roof of it. So the golden turd will serve as a handy land mark now for keeping ourselves oriented.

The Sensoji temple itself is a pretty well known attraction, and it brings a lot of people through the market that leads up to it. The shops mostly sell souvenirs, except for the odd ice cream stand... or the ice cream burger stand that we were looking for.

Actually, we did go back to the ice cream burger stand, but it was still closed. What's the deal? If it's not open when everything else is open, when is it open? Will we ever find out what ice cream burgers are??? Are they so bad that the place went out of business? We'll keep coming back until we get to the bottom of this.

The Sensoji temple is pretty impressive, and ornate. And you can get your fortune there. At least, that's what we figured out after about 10 minutes of watching people. You donate 50 yen, and then shake a jar full of sticks and make a wish. There's a hole in the top where you pull out one stick. The stick has a number on it (in Kanji) so if you match up the symbols, they correspond to a drawer containing your fortune. Fortunately, the fortune has an English translation. The English isn't amazing, but it's good enough.

I got a "bad fortune", one that included the threat of a run-in with the law. It's also a "bad time to travel". I probably wouldn't have been too worried, but Mitch got the same fortune. Uh oh. Better be on the good side of the law. No jaywalking for us today.

To explore some other areas, we set out on foot. We were heading to Akhiabra, which is the electronics district, but first we stopped for lunch at a sushi bar. Ah, finally! And this was a typical Tokyo sushi bar, with the conveyor belt and everything. You sit around the sushi bar and grab tasty plates as they come by. The plates are colour coded by price, and when you're done, the hostess adds up your stack of plates. Pretty simple.

And we did our best to keep the sushi chefs inside the bar busy. We all ate about as much as we could of the delicious sushi and it only came to about $15 each, so compared to back home, that's actually pretty cheap. And people say Tokyo is an expensive city!

Continuing our walk, we went through a neighbourhood that seemed to specialize in restaurant supplies. Shops sold bowls, plates, chopsticks, and... plastic food. We'd seen this stuff in display cases at a lot of restaurants, so I guess it had to come from somewhere. So if you want a bowl of plastic udon, I know the place to go. Actually, the stuff looks really good. Very realistic actually. The Japanese are undoubtedly the world leaders in fake food, I'd say.

Akhiabara was a bit different than we expected. I thought there'd be robots everywhere. No such luck. There were a lot of new and used electronics stores. There was nothing too exotic, however. I think the rest of the world has kind of caught up in terms of what technologies are available.

We did spend some time in a used video game store. They had Sega Saturns, so scratch that off the scavenger hunt list. Actually, I would have picked up a game or a controller or two if they had any that were compatible with the North American system that currently resides at my brothers house in Calgary. It just wasn't meant to be I guess.

We popped in an arcade, found Daytona USA, a game called "type or die", and a Jurassic Park Lost World game. We spent a few yen in there before leaving Akhiabara and heading to the Imperial Palace gardens.

And it was on our walk that Mike knocked over a small child. Just bowled him right over. They just didn't see each other. Mike felt horrible, but the kid didn't seem to care at all and just got up and carried on. I don't think the mother either noticed or cared either, and that actually seems pretty standard in Tokyo. It's up to the kids to figure out how to navigate crowds. Not much hand-holding going on.

That doesn't mean we won't make fun of Mike forever.

We got to the Imperial Palace just as it closed. We are not very good at this city yet. Some things just close at 4pm.

We were somehow getting hungry again despite our sushi lunch, so we found a place tucked under the tracks that had cheap food and beer. We regrouped after our failure to find robots and the emperor of Japan (or a robot emperor), and headed off to the Sony store.

This is not an ordinary Sony store. It's about 8 stories tall, and it's a showroom of all the latest and greatest technology that Sony has or is developing. Right in the lobby, we were able to play the PlayStation Vita, the new portable playstation coming out. It won't be available in North America until March, and it's actually not out in Japan until next week, so I feel like I accomplished something. It's kind of like travelling into the future.

The most interesting thing that they had in the Sony store was a TV that you where on your head, like a virtual reality headset. The screen is about four inches in front of your face, and the headphones are built in. It was $10,000. It was neat, but imagine if you wanted to have people over to watch something. You'd have to have one for everybody...

Jurassic Park was showing in the home theatre room, and Back to the Future was playing on a flat screen TV nearby. I approved.

So we'd scratched off a few things on the Tokyo hit list: Technology, Sega Saturn, arcades, and a shrine.

Back at the hostel, we met up with the Aussies again, and decided to have a night in the neighbourhood rather than trying to catch a subway back or trying to stay out all night until they start running again. (Staying out until 5am sounds too tough for me...)

So we got beers from 7-11 and started off playing a game of circle of death (featuring the "moustache mayhem" rule developed in part by your truly one new years eve). Then we set out to wander the neighbourhood, and visited the temple at night... you know, again. (Ice cream burgers was closed, we checked).

Mitch and I were a little paranoid, given our bad fortunes, that we would have our run in with the law. So it was a bit hard to let loose completely... Ultimately, we ended up at a fast food restaurant for some cheap beer before calling it a night. No one was arrested. Oh, and the restaurant menu featured things including "Deep-fried a horse mackerel" and "Deep-fried the arms of a cuddlefish".

The next day we got off to our traditional slow start and visited the Sumo Museum and the Edo Tokyo Museum. Unfortunately there aren't any sumo festivals going on in December, so we won't be able to catch an actual match. We had to settle for the video in the museum. There wasn't much English on the displays, but it was a free museum, so you can't complain.

But we got lucky when a Japanese sumo fan used all the English he had to introduce us to the most famous yokozunas whose pictures were hung on the wall. He kept describing height, weight, and the strength of the different yokozunas, like you would expect, but he also kept talking about hand size. So hand size must be pretty important for sumos. And actually, instead of autographs, you can buy hand prints of the sumo wrestlers instead. It's neat.

Our new Japanese friend bid us farewell and we headed over to the Edo Tokyo Museum nearby. Edo was the name of the city before the emperor made it the capital and changed the name to Tokyo. We got a bit confused when they asked us if we wanted a free guide, and we said yes, assuming that it would be an audio guide. It turns out it was actually a person. An American ex-pat was one of the volunteer guides, who offered to give us a full tour in English. She realized that we probably preferred to just wander around ourselves, so she gave us a quick historical overview of the city and an overview of the museum. It was actually very very helpful.

The museum itself has a lot of neat displays and models chronicling the history of the city, including a lot of info on the major earthquakes that have caused large fires and destroyed the city several times. That kind of explains why everything looks new in Tokyo. Everything old has been destroyed.

They also had the "instrument of surrender" from world war II, where our Canadian delegate had signed on the wrong line, forcing everyone else to shuffle a line down, with a lot of lines crossed out and words written in to fix the mistake. Nice work there.

Understandably, there is not much info on World War II. I would have been interested to read more of the Japanese perspective. We only hear it from the war from the one side. It makes sense that the Japanese wouldn't proudly tell the story, and it was probably been muzzled a bit from years of occupation post-war. But I'd be interested. There's probably a lot of untold stories.

Imperial Gardens Round II: Inside the walls. We went back to the Imperial Palace and successfully walked around the gardens. No sign of the emperor, but the fall colours really made it nice. And the large grass lawn gave us a nice place to sit down and take a rest.

It was an early night for us because we planed to get up early and take in the famous fish market the next morning. And we did get up at 5:30am and caught a subway to the Tsukiji fish market. This is supposed to be the busiest fish market in the world, and packed with organised chaos.

That's why we were a bit confused when we got off the train, and there was no one around.

Were we at the wrong stop? No, the signs in the subway had directed us this way. We were in the right area. And then a couple other tourists saw us and told us that the market was closed, and they had only just found that out also. Damn it. Getting up early is bad enough, but getting up early for nothing? To top it off, it was raining. It was the first time we'd seen clouds on the entire trip.

When we got back to the hostel , we saw a calendar on the wall with the dates that the market was closed, which was every Sunday, and every second Wednesday. It happened to be that Wednesday.

We took this as a sign that it was time to leave Tokyo. We just weren't that good it at it yet. We need to go away, practice, and come back. We'll do better next time. So it's back to sleep until a more reasonable hour, and then it's off to Kyoto!

But not before another resident of the hostel returned after a late night and drunkenly told us, "Don't go to Roppongi. Shit gets real..." After a good ten minutes of trying to get the story out of him, it really didn't sound like much happened. But "shit" allegedly got "real". Whatever then.

Some observations on Tokyo:

1) Toyko is the cleanest city I've ever been to.

2) The cars here seem really quiet. I'm not sure why that is, but the traffic doesn't make a ton of noise. A lot of the cars are hybrids, so that might be part of it. They're also all new. People like new things.

3) December seems like a nice time to visit. We had 4 straight days with clear blue skies and the high was about 10 degrees or higher. Maybe we were just lucky, but the fall colours are a nice touch too.

4) Everything talks. Escalators, doors, everything.

5) Heated toilet seats. And they have lot's of buttons.

6) Symbols and signs are not always intuitive, and often feature cartoon characters instead of people or stick figures.

7) There's very little green space, save for a handful of large parks.

8) The vending machines are a bit of a let down. I expected more than just drink machines. Still, you can get hot drinks out of them, which is pretty wild, but I was hoping for more variety of stuff to be available, like food, toiletries, etc. I'm sure they're around, but we didn't see any.

9) Tommy Lee Jones is everywhere. He is a poster boy for the Boss beverage company.

10) There are not robots on every corner. Or any corner. Not yet, anyway.

11) Convenience stores are not like convenience stores back home. Here, they're actually "convenient", and not any more expensive than a grocery store. Imagine that... and the pre-made meals are actually quite tasty.

12) Nothing here is old. There are no old buildings or architecture, except for the temples and shrines. The city has been destroyed a bunch of times from earthquakes and bombed in WWII, but none of the old buildings have been re-built. The Japanese seem to like things that are new.

13) Tokyo is not nearly as expensive as we expected. Food is actually quite cheap. Accommodations are a bit more than in western countries, but not by too much.

14) Grocery stores are not that plentiful, and they seem to all be located in the basement of malls.

15) They have heated toilet seats. There's also a lot of buttons. One button plays the sound of flushing the toilet without actually flushing the toilet. I don't know why.

16) Symbols and signs are not that intuitive, and there don't seem to be street signs anywhere. Landmarks and matching the shape of the map with the roads we see is the only way we've found to navigate so far.

17) When the subway shuts down, it shuts down. Regardless of where the train is.

18) Tokyo is huge.

19) Garbage cans are few and far between.

20) There are no benches anywhere. Sitting must be a sign of weakness in Japan. Or at least I assume that's why people stare at us when we eat our convenience store lunches on the sidewalk.

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Photos

Daytime Temple Time
Looks different when there's people here.