Japan Visit

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JFK to Tokyo:

II'm going to try to write this travel blog/essay, whatever you call it in a way that is interesting and informative. I am going to fail a lot. Your solution is to skip over parts that are about things not interesting or informative. Some of you will be done reading within 12 seconds, others, the more discerning and open of you will read and hang on every word. I'll never know.

In this season it's only appropriate to start with politics. As a Democrat, I am all for equality and equal opportunity, but with all due guilt and humility, I’ll tell you that that sitting and sleeping in the front of a JAL 777 is the way to go. Even Democrats can enjoy this. You know what Obama said, the one thing he'll miss the most after being President is Air Force One. So it's not Air Force One but the flight attendant made our beds. The food was excellent and the Bordeaux was more than passable. But enough of that.

In spite of the pampering there is still a 13-hour time change and our internal clocks were not the least bit impressed by our luxurious travel methods. We were feeling it. After landing at the spotless and efficient Tokyo airport, and we took a 1 ½ hour drive to our hotel, the Aman Tokyo.

We are traveling with the machitunim, or more accurately, we are traveling on the trip put together by Gary and Judi that we were graciously invited to join. It’s just the four of us. We travel well together. A couple of years ago we traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia and so we were especially excited to be offered to travel again. For us this works great. Gary loves to plan and Fran and I are more than eager to benefit from his planning. But the itinerary always includes space and flexibility, something the four of us need a bit of.

Our 4 PM (3 AM on the east coast of the US) arrival at the Aman Hotel gave us time to rest a little, shower, and get ready for dinner. Our tentative plan to walk around and find something low key gave way to the reality that it was raining and we were pooped. So, we ate a reasonably simple dinner at the hotel, in their Italian restaurant. By the time we were half way done with our entrees, Fran had fallen sound asleep sitting up, her head bobbing and her mouth slightly open. I managed to wake her in my own sensitive way. While I’m not at liberty to give details here, suffice it to say she reacted in a way only an exhausted wife of 33 years could react. Eyebrows were raised. We retreated to our beautiful room. The best thing about our room was the toilet. It gets to know you. The lid opens when you approach. It flushes and puts the seat down when you leave. The seat itself is comfortably heated and then there are many accouterments; several varieties of washes, from a vertical spritz to a gentle shower, aim-able with the buttons, a nice air dryer, and a power de-scenter. I want one. Our bed was wonderful with a thin, futon type mattress that was extraordinarily comfortable. Maybe it had something to do with jet lag but so what. It was 9 PM in Tokyo, 8 AM in Ft. Lauderdale. Sleep came quickly for both of us. At 12:30 in the morning I woke up and was wide awake, but I forced myself to try to sleep more. Until 2:30. And then, with less success, I forced myself to sleep again until 3:30 and then with almost no success, again to 4:30 at which time I was up, up, up. Fran had fewer problems. She spent the night with her friend Mr. Ambien. I thought about going down to the Bar like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, but we were at the wrong hotel and I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t meet Scarlett Johannsen. Had we been staying at the Park Hyatt and had I gone to the bar at 3:30 or 4:30 and had I met Ms. Johannsen, I would imagine that this essay would have been quite different and infinitely more interesting. What men think of when they can’t sleep!

Day 1 in Tokyo

As we were up early, I decided to go to the gym and see if I could work out some of the jet lag. Fran came with me to do yoga until the pool opened at 6:30. The Aman has the most beautiful indoor pool that either of us had ever seen or even could imagine. The water was a perfect warm temperature and, combined with the view off the end of the pool of the Tokyo skyline as the sun was rising, we refreshed ourselves as best as possible. After a western breakfast, we left on our all-day tour with our very nice tour guide, a young woman who has a very long name that starts with Ch. It was unpronounceable so, with her acquiescence, we called her Cheers. I noticed as several things as we headed out in our Toyota minivan. The city is huge; 15 million, and the center is dense or more dense than New York and yet it is spotless. There is no garbage on the street; zero, nothing. And everything seems to be perfectly maintained. No cracked sidewalks or potholes. And the traffic moved. Nobody blocked the box. It was quiet. No horns or sirens or screaming. No Harleys. In fact, the city was so quiet it seemed smaller than it is. As to the quiet, people spoke softly which made it especially challenging for my old ears. It’s hard enough understanding people talking with strong accents, but add to that talking softly and my most common refrain to anything was what? Japanese people bow. Everybody bows. Up and down and within minutes we were bowing too. It is an acknowledgement of our presence. It is a greeting. It’s a lot of things I don’t understand. There are deep bows and shallow bows. Slow bows and quick little bows. I think it is very about respect. I’m sure it’s researchable. One more thing for tourists, the Japanese people speak Japanese, signs are in Japanese, and if you don’t have a guide or translator with you, good luck. Very few Japanese speak any English.

Our first stop on our all-day tour was the famous fish market; one of the biggest in the world.This is where tons and tons of bluefin tuna are auctioned every morning for internal consumption and export. We got there about 9 AM but the auction took place at 6 AM so all we really could see was the facility. It was spotless This is the new fish market. It opened two weeks ago. The old one was closed after 30 years. Outside of the old fish market which we also visited, there are hundreds of stalls selling most everything but predominantly fish, from bags of dried minnow-type fish to slabs of fresh fish, oysters and the like. Gary and I tried oysters from a stall. The oysters are huge and very “flavorful,” but you have to really like oysters. Then we sampled fresh fried chicken skin. It looked better than it tasted. We had paper in our hands, napkins from the oysters and chicken skin so we looked around for a garbage can. There are none. There is no litter on the street. Even in the public bathrooms there are signs imploring people to take their garbage with them. Imagine New York with no garbage cans. According to Cheers, they used to have them but after the 1995 Sarin gas attacks they took them away. Japanese people now take their litter and garbage home with them for proper disposal. Japanese pay attention to rules. They do not jaywalk.

Lunch was at a ramen restaurant. We sat at a crowded lunch counter and all ordered hot bowls of ramen with pork. It challenged our chop stick techniques. The noodles were slippery so we did what Japanese people do. We picked up the bowl, grabbed as many noodles as we could get to stay on our chopsticks and slurped away. The sound at the restaurant of everyone slurping would have made Emily Post roll over in her grave. It was delicious.

After lunch, we visited several Shinto shrines. Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan. On survey, 80% of Japanese identified as Shinto, 60% as Buddhist, and 1% as Christian. There are Jews; several thousand of us, all Caucasian, almost all in some remote northern part of Japan. You might pause here and ask about the numbers; 80% plus 60% plus 1%, by my count equals 141%. Cheers finds this funny too and she is Shinto. Shinto is not a monotheistic religion, and Cheers says it's more of a lifestyle, but there is a lot of praying that goes on. They pray for happiness and health and lots of things, a lot of times. there are priests and people get blessed, but there are a lot of gods. Anything can be a god. For example, at one shrine we visited there are two enormous camphor trees about 15 feet apart. They were planted in the 1920s. They grew up next to one another, happy and healthy. Strung between them is a woven rope with banners hanging down from the rope. The trees are gods of happiness and matrimony and Shinto practitioners pray at the trees for good marriages. Were it just that easy!

That night we took a taxi to a Michelin two-star sushi restaurant. Uber isn't successful here and I know why. The taxis are spotless, inside and out. The drivers wear suits, they know where they are going and they open the doors for their passengers. They don't take tips. However, this restaurant was down an alley and the driver missed it. He apologized profusely for having to drive around the block. We were greeted by a hostess who came out with umbrellas to escort us in. There were only nine seats at the bar and we sat at a corner so we could talk to each other. The chef owner prepared our meal, twenty some courses. It would have made an interesting video. He was fantastic with the knife and making sushi. He would show us pictures in a fish book of the fish we were being served. As to the taste though, they revel in fish that tastes like fish, not the bland, inoffensive sushi we are used to. And each course, a single bite, was different from the last. Gary and I were brave and determined to try everything, no matter how it appeared or smelled. Judi and Fran were more discerning, maybe less concerned about offending the chef. Some of the items were magnificent. Those were the ones that we were sort of used to, the three types of tuna and other straight up fish. But he really liked serving the unusual, different kinds of roe with really intense flavors. And there was this one item; we couldn’t figure out what it was by looking. The color was a bland ocher and it looked and felt like a glob of jelly. Fran said no way. When we put it in our mouths and bit down we were flooded with an explosion of an intense gooey liquid tasting of what I imagine is fermented fish. If you’ve ever seen “Somebody Feed Phil,” a series where Phil goes around the world to try new foods, there is one scene where Phil tries a 100 year old egg in China. It was just like that. Gary and I looked at one another. He was gagging. He put his hand over his mouth and struggled but forced it down. I just swallowed quickly. Judi took it in stride. But that was it for me. Whatever it was, it killed my appetite for more. Soon after, we told the chef, enough. And he was ok with that. It was a fantastic experience, really. I’ll stick to good US sushi. I’m saying this today but there is another sushi restaurant in Kyoto coming up later in the trip. Will report on that soon.

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