My favorite Japan photos

A while ago I posted a list of the best photos from my trip to Italy last summer, so it’s time to follow that up with the best of my Japan trip. It sounds crazy to a lot of people, but I got far more pleasure out of my 2 weeks in Japan than I did from 3 weeks of Italy.

So click here if you have a few minutes to spare for 23 of the best/most amusing photos I took… it’s like a free little vacation!

Lately I’ve been reminiscing about that trip a lot, wishing I could go back for another few weeks at least. I hate hot weather, and Japan gets pretty damn hot, but I really want to go again anyway. I figure if I’m still single when I hit 41, I’m goin’.

そです, ね?

Ramen, kabuki, crowds, eel, museums, subways, onsens, systemic politeness/detachment, sushi, automated hot chocolate, cryptic but manageable language, etc etc etc…  Living there would be a terrific challenge; probably not for the rest of my life, but at least for a few years. Then it would probably be nice to come back home!

Shugakuin gardens

Shugakuin gardens

Originally uploaded by UncleVinny

I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since I was in Japan… time flies, eh!

If I’ve never chewed your ear off about how much I loved Shugakuin, be glad. “This reminds me of a boring, pointless story that I take a very very long time to tell…pull up a chair!”

Eel!

Eel!

Originally uploaded by UncleVinny

Seriously, people. This was some damn fine eel, in a nice little restaurant in Kyoto that the Old Kyoto book recommnded to me. Most of their recommendations weren’t as cool as I was hoping, but this one was stellar.

I’m not crazy about the way Flickr and WordPress work together, but eh, you can click the link if you want to see a big version of the photo.

And besides, I’m just reminiscing… nom nom nom!

Standing sushi bar

Ok, here’s a pretty cool memory from Japan. I was wandering around one night, and saw the prices listed for the sushi at the place shown here. 75 yen for 2 pieces of sushi?! Too good to be true, right? Wrong!

It was FANTASTIC, a much better deal than any sushi I’ve ever had, and I’ve eaten a lot over the years. It was so much more satisfying to pay $12 for a boatload of supremely wonderful sushi at this place than the $24 I spent on sub-par stuff at Blue C the other day.

Not quite the best I’ve ever had, but really really good.

April 19 — Asakusa, Hama Rikyu and Shibuya

Thursday morning I woke up and, after having a crazy delicious sushi breakfast for $12, headed out to the allegedly fabulous Asakusa area, where there are fancy shrines and such. And it’s true… there are nice shrines and temples there, if that’s your sort of thing. But it’s absolutely crawling with tourists and schoolkids, and the touristy vendors are packed in there like bees during queening season. I browsed around half-heartedly, took a few pictures, and then settled down to watch tourists and schoolkids for a while… that was way more interesting than the smoky ol’ shrines.

The little Tokyo guidebook insisted that a ride down on the Tokyo Sightseeing Boat was a thrillride, and I wanted to get down to the Hama Rikyu garden anyway, so I waited around for it. The ride itself was desperately tedious (no English translation of what was going by, and even if there had been, I doubt those anonymous-looking apartment buildings have a rich history), so I was happy when it was over.

I’d heard good things about the Hama Rikyu gardens, and the weather niced up a bit in time for me to walk through admiringly.  It’s a pretty big park, but the buildings of Tokyo are paused menacingly at its borders a bit like their waiting for a fire or a moment’s madness on the part of the zoning board to sweep it away.

I think I went to Shinjuku next, but I don’t remember much about it. I could swear that I went there twice, but it just doesn’t ring any bells. In any case, I ended up at a pretty fun toy store… not 1000% zanier than US toy stores as I’d been led to believe, but still pretty fun! The craze these days is for these little bobblehead dolls that are gently solar-powered so that they rock their li’l heads back and forth in a semi-stoned way. Those into Feng Shui will place auspiciously-colored stoned bobbleheads facing in different directions in their homes, to attract love, money, power, satisfactory espresso, etc.

Then it was back to Jimbocho, my hotel’s neighborhood, where I knew there was a 7-11. My friend Joe recommended that I try a lasagne roll at 7-11, and I was pretty curious about that. I ended up looking at 7-11 and AM/PM, but didn’t find such a thing. But I found a chocolate-banana sandwich and a knock-off Starbucks iced latte in a paper cup, so it wasn’t a total loss.

The destination for that night was Shibuya, or Shibu-YA! as my little guidebook hyped it. I’d been a little let-down by the lack of neon and crowds in Tokyo so far, and li’l guidebook assured me that this would do the trick. WOW! So true. Shibuya was completely fun and exciting, and (although I’m a little embarrassed of this) became my favorite area of Tokyo. Tokyo’s not really pretending to be about old-world culture, etc. It’s glossy, bright, expensive and shallow, and Shibuya really nails that feeling. I had fun wandering through the amazingly beautiful department stores, shopping for wacky t-shirts, browsing records and CDs, tons of people-watching, and, most significantly, finding the Standing Sushi Bar, where I got 2 pieces of sushi for 75 yen — as much as I could eat. I could eat a lot!

Seriously, can you people even imagine how cheap that is? 75 yen is 62 cents. Even after you order nama biiru and order some miso soup, you get a boatload of (really pretty decent) sushi for practically no money at all. They’re giving it away, it’s a sushi fire sale! I think this is where I added bonito to my list of Sushi to Order Every Time. (Others on the list: tamago, hamachi, sake, maguro and toro. Later addition: scallops.)

April 18 — Kabuki and a hot bath

In the morning, I leapt out of bed excited about another day of great food, etc. Took the subway to Ginza and went into a very cheap little 24-hour place for breakfast. For 330 yen (i.e., less than 3 dollars), I had a bowl of rice with some very thinly sliced bacon in it. It was really awesome, because I was hungry, and it was reassuring to see how cheaply a person could get great food. I fiddled around in Ginza for a while, waiting for the Kabuki-za to open its doors.

If you’d asked me what I knew about Kabuki before I went in, just about the only thing would have been the phrase “like some kind of kabuki dance”… something cryptic that may or may not have some internally consistent logic and meaning that remains unknowable to westerners. After reading a little pamphlet while waiting for the show to start, I learned a few more things: All the actors are men. The costumes and makeup are very elaborate, heavy and expensive. The dancing, singing and posing on stage have a very long tradition in Japan, going back hundreds of years. Some actors are renowned for their nimbleness and agility while fighting, despite the heavy costume. Others are admired for their ability to play women, and specialize in those roles throughout their career. Kabuki isn’t so much about representing the story in the script as it is giving the actor a chance to act — “western theatre is about representation, kabuki is about presentation“. A kabuki actor gets on stage in order to perform kabuki and elicit a reaction from himself and the audience, not necessarily to tell a story, educate or advance a set of ideas.

It’s forbidden to take photos during the performance, so I just took two of the stage and the fantastic curtain. The fabrics and costumes were simply incredible throughout… the most sensational reds, whites, greens, etc… The lighting of the stage was also exceptionally vivid, in one case recreating a scene of a shogun looking out of his window towards the moon. A cool and quiet shaft of white moonlight passed at an angle through his shoji at the beginning of the scene, as he was quietly reflecting on his father’s death. Then, as people started to come into the room and bother him, the stage began to light up — blossom, I’d say — gently in the center with a gorgeous orange. This orange light gathered momentum as the entrants spoke their lines, and as it became clear that his solitude was going to be disrupted by events of the story the blossom turned almost into a fireball, filling up the entire stage and leaving no quiet cool corners for reflection and thought. The effect was exhilarating and frightening; although the story wasn’t sympathetic to the shogun, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for anyone disturbed by such a pernicious, powerful and gorgeous force. I’ve just never seen color used so effectively as an entity on stage, where a viewer might feel that the color of the costumes, screens, lights or scenery is something threatening, welcoming or in some other way a personification of action on stage.

Kabuki lasted from 11am to 4pm, with a few breaks here and there to allow for stretching and eating. I was a little unclear on the concept of ordering a bento lunch for the big break, so I went with nothing but vending machine yogurt and a few jelly-candy samples. 5 hours of kabuki was a tough test for my butt, back and legs, but my brain was pretty well mesmerized. I had a little radio for one ear that gave me a quiet description of generally what was happening on stage, including a fair amount of info on the history of kabuki. There was very little direct translation of what was being said, for the same reason that a real-time 1:1 translation of Hamlet to Japanese would be mostly useless to somene being shown a Shakespeare play for the first time. Now and then they would give a sketch of the sort of puns or allusions that were in play, but for the most part the radio was kept busy helping me with Kabuki 101.

The first performance was the story of two brothers who had finally sort-of decided to take revenge on a man for killing their father. The one brother is less certain about wanting to kill the man, and the man’s daughter is in love with the truly hostile brother. Almost nothing actually happened in this play. There is a great patch of bellowing, posing and grimacing but at the end of the day no weapons are drawn and the curtain comes down as the hostile brother is wildly demonstrating how angry he is at the situation. This was the most puzzling of the 4 plays I saw, because so much of the crazy posturing, unusual hand and arm movements and odd vocalizations were completely new to me. When it was over I definitely felt that I’d missed the significance of almost everything that I saw.

The second story was about a palace guard who killed the shogun by mistake, while the shogun was in costume trying to get over the castle walls to his mistress. The play is set 3 years after the previous shogun’s death, and country is in mourning. Everyone has been led to believe that he died when he fell from his horse. The new shogun, his son, doesn’t believe this story and is trying to get his mother (Tamako) to reveal the real reason for his father’s death. The guard feels awful that he killed the shogun, even though he was right to be defending the castle; he loved the shogun, and being his murderer also puts a cloud over his head lest anyone discover what he did. He’s also in love with one of Tamako’s maids, and she’s confused why he won’t agree to marry her. When he finally reveals to her that he killed the shogun, and that they can never be together, she falls over in a fit of grief and anguish — both for the pain and paralysis he must feel in his situation, and because she realizes that the can never be together. Despite all the artifice of the presentation, this moment made me cry… the situation was awful enough, but it was something about the quality of her cry and collapse combined with his roaring about his duty that really got to me. The second part was interesting for other reasons. The young shogun is still nosing around trying to get someone to reveal how his father really died, and finally figures it out that only Tamako and the guard know the answer. Despite having absolute power and employing any number of clever ruses and feints, he’s unable to force either of them to tell him the truth. (The guard ends up killing his lover with Tamako’s approval, because she’s about to reveal to the shogun what really happened.) Tamako declares that the truth about his father’s death would cause shame to the family, and although it would make the young shogun feel better to know it, it is more important that the family name remain strong. After all, he will be shogun for only 20-30 years, but the family name will live on to have many other shoguns after him. His needs are subordinate to those of his descendents, etc., and he roars in frustration as the curtain is swept across to close the play.

The third play was also cryptic. A large green ceremonial bell has been possessed by the spirit of a jealous woman who has taken the form of a snake. A man and a woman dance around the bell as various monks comment on the aspects of the dances and the natures of the dancers, including whether they are really who they say they are, or whether one of them is a well-known comedian from the next province. This was thoroughly confusing, and barely funny.

The final play told the story of a samurai and his master who had infiltrated the house of an old warrior, hoping to steal from him the Tiger Scroll of Strategy that would allow their clan (Genji) to return to power. Their plot was revealed when the warrior commanded the samurai to attack his master to prove he was not a spy. Since a samurai can’t attack his master, he had to beg off with a miserable excuse, and the warrior expelled them both from his service. They commiserated afterwards about how sad it was that being bound by honor to the samurai code prevented them from aiding their clan, etc. This one seemed more straightforward, but after 5 hours I was pretty out of it, and probably missed more than usual.

One other quick thing I should mention, and that is the strange use of props and costumes in kabuki. Stagehands dressed all in black will often creep on stage, and the audience is supposed to pretend that we can’t see them. Black is the color of invisibility, you see. They’ll creep up to a chair to move it, or several of them will creep up to an actor and begin fiddling with the costume, sometimes for 10 minutes as the actor is talking or singing, or just sitting quietly on stage. Then at some dramatic moment in the play, the stagehands will whisk the outer costume away, revealing a completely different costume underneath. (You can see a dramatic example of that here.) The crowd is of course dazzled by this… it’s a stunning effect, and the little radio told me that some transitions are far more demanding on the stagehands than others.

After kabuki, I was really hungry, and made one of my getting-lost decisions. I subwayed up to an area I didn’t know anything about, and figured I’d find some food. Oh dear. None of the little restaurants had signs out front that I could understand, and most of them didn’t seem to have signs at all. So I wandered and wandered, eventually going into a little place run by an older guy who didn’t speak a word of English. I got some pretty good sashimi out of him, but it was pretty unsteady going for both of us. He took a couple of passes at my little dictionary, and I kept trying to tell him that it was OK to pick random things out for me… but he seemed really reluctant or unable to do that. So we muddled through for a while, and I left a little less hungry than I was before, but not at all sated. This was in Morishita, I think.

From there I headed down to Azabu-juban, where my little guidebook told me I could find a nice tourist-friendly hot-springs (onsen) place. Um…. After wandering around and around as per my usual methods, I saw what sure looked like an onsen, but without the tourist accessibility. Figuring that it couldn’t be too complicated, I went in. Luckily enough, I was right, but again this place was a Zero on the English scale. (After this, I stopped being surprised at all that people didn’t speak any English, and started being surprised when anyone knew any at all.) It was also lucky that an old guy went in at the same time as me, so I was able to tag along after him like a duckling — from a distance, of course — and just do what he did.

Public baths are a big deal over there, but less so than they used to be, so it’s kind of an old-school experience to go to one. Most of the people are over 50, and it definitely feels like you’re off the Ginza/Shibuya track. You get naked, grab your towel, and go to the little spigot area where you sit down on a little stool and give yourself a bath/shower/shampoo, etc.  Once you’re all clean, you hop in the tub (which might be warm, hot or damn hot) to soak as long as you like. You keep your towel in some strategic spot (on top of your head in a neat little stack) or some tourist spot (on a shelf on the wall). The
place I hit in Azabu-juban was damn hot, and it was all I could do to stay there for 20-30 minutes, gradually removing roasted parts of myself to be placed on the sideboard for carving. I came out feeling roasty, a little drunk and even hungrier than before.

In another lucky strike, I found a little Okinawan restaurant, where I snacked on “Okinawa noodle soup in softly chinese stewed pork”. DAE will have to explain to me about being softly Chinese…

Somewhere along the line that night I found an internet cafe, and after blindly stabbing away at the Japanese menus for long enough, I switched the keyboard to (sort of) English characters and checked my email. Internet cafes in Tokyo are a little disturbing. Pull me aside sometime and I’ll try to explain.

April 17 — Tsukiji ‘n’ Meiji

I woke up pretty early — partly on purpose, partly because I was still on my Seattle schedule — and took the subway down to the Tsukuji fish market. I got there around 7am when it was still pretty exciting. Struck by a profound feeling that I didn’t belong there, that people were trying to work and that I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for, I pressed on in search of the fish market Experience. There were all sorts of people bustling around with fish in various sizes and states of deadness. Remarkably, the smell was awfully good for a fish market that has been open for so long. So much so, in fact, that I found a little sushi place nearby and had a little sushi breakfast that was really top notch. It was here that I began to realize that even if I could say some Japanese things correctly, I had a very small chance of understanding anything that the native speaker said to me in return. Sigh.

(Tsuki-ji means Moon Temple, and I can’t say I understand what that has to do with fish, but whatever.)

I really should have taken more pictures of all the fish activities, but I was very camera shy… everyone looked so busy! And I felt so much like a stupid tourist. But I did have time to wonder what would happen to all of the styrofoam they were using to pack the fish, and as you can see from the Flickr set, they use it to make a styrofoam mountain in hopes of appeasing the forest-god of packaging materials.

From there I blundered north, hoping to find the fabled Ginza shopping area and soon realized that I would usually be lost in Japan. None of the streets or directions or bearings that I thought I had a grip on were correct, and as a light rain fell, I just surrendered to the coming 2 weeks of bewilderment. At some point I noticed that there are frequently large maps around the subway exits, complete with a big “you are here” arrow that helpfully points in the direction you’re acutally looking — although sometimes the arrow has been obliterated by the thousands of stupid tourists poking at it. These maps are helpful for orienting yourself before you zig-zag out into the byzantine alleys again to get hopelessly confused. Sometimes after pingponging around for45 minutes, you’ll run into the same goddamn map and wish you had a blowtorch or a can of Tourist Blood-colored paint to splash about in feckless protest.

I was really surprised then when I found myself at the park just south of the Imperial Palace.  I’d been going West all that time?! Good lord. In any case, I decided to make the best of it and enjoy the little park. It had wild cats! Very exciting. They didn’t have much interest in me, go figure.

Lunch was really outstanding, although I have no idea what it was called aside from “A” on the menu. Some kind of chicken dish with an orange-colored sauce over it. That’s when I knew I was in business, foodwise. If a random yokel could walk in off the street and get such deliciousness for 900 yen, it was going to be a good vacation. (In retrospect, I definitely didn’t always have such good luck buying random food, this was really special.)

I headed back to my room to pick up two bottles of semi-local beer that I’d brought for Junko, a friend of a friend who had offered to meet me in Tokyo and see how I was getting along. She really misses Mac ‘n’ Jacks, but it’s sadly unavailable in a bottle, so I did the best I could. Draft beer really is better…!

But before I met Junko, I got in the neighborhood (Harajuku) and headed to the Meiji Shrine. Emperor Meiji, as you may recall, is pretty big deal, having retaken supreme power in Japan for the Emperor after the shoguns had been the top dog for many centuries. He also moved the capital of the country from Kyoto to Edo, renamed Edo to Tokyo and, since he still had leftover energy,  went beyond the forced opening of Japan to western trade to encourage his countrymen to learn from and adopt/adapt the ways of Westerners. He ruled for more than 40 years, and had a huge part in forming modern Japan.

The Meiji shrine is one of those things you’re obligated to see in Tokyo, and it was the first shrine I saw. I must say that every other shrine I saw in Japan (and I got a belly full, believe me) was at least a little dimmer and less satisfying than this. I’m not a big fan of religious buildings for their religiosity’s sake, but I can often find something wonderful about the place to get excited about anyway. If you ever heard me go on and on about the cathedral at Cologne, you’ll understand. The Meiji Shrine is set in a tremendously large park that includes both the Meiji Garden and the Shrine. After walking under one of the spectacularly large torii, I visited the garden, and was pleased to find it nearly empty. This had a nice calming effect, as did meeting a nice German guy named Sebastian who had just moved to Japan for a year to learn to become a Japanese gardener. Pretty cool! He was taking a lot of notes and looking at the garden much more critically than I, so I left him to his niwa and headed to see the shrine.

Again, despite being one of the premier tourist- and local destinations in Tokyo, the place was quite empty on a rainy Tuesday, so I took some pictures, sat on a bench and absorbed the place as best I could. My favorite thing about the shrine is the big old tree with all of the wooden prayer-requests below it. There’s a technical name for these things, but I don’t know it… basically, people write down something they’re hoping for on a nicely-scented slab of wood, and then hang them on pegs around the base of the tree. Every morning the monks collect these and burn them, which I imagine also must smell pretty nice. If I was a god, or a recently deceased emperor-god, I would appreciate the choice of wood.

It was getting to be about time to meet Junko, so I headed out towards the exit… or so I thought. In the real world, I headed out to get lost in the big park as rain was beginning to fall, and I would stay lost despite several intense moments of scrutiny at the maps posted here and there at the park. At one point I was walking along thinking, “You know, this isn’t just a light rain anymore. It’s just…. raining.” The jacket waterproofing I’d done in Seattle was showing its true colors… chartreuse for failure, I’d say.

I bought a cheap umbrella and still managed to meet Junko on time, though! We headed up to a cool gallery that had different rooms for various up and coming artists, such as Jack Tsai. There was also a super-cool calligraphy guy that made pictures with the kanji… I wanted to take a photo, but it was cool just to see it. Junko talked to him a lot, and figured out that he was a calligraphy teacher, and that he also did calligraphy for the sticks that people put beside gravestones. He wasn’t particularly religious, she said, but all of his art had some kind of buddhist message behind it. In any case, it was awesome…

Then we went out for izakaya dinner. This is a kind of bar with advanced snacks… a little like tapas, maybe, but definitely japanese. I never would have made it in the door of such a place, nor have known what to do, where to go, what to order, etc. So Junko helped out a lot! All this time, she was teaching me helpful Japanese phrases, and applauding when I got something simple correct. The phrase that pays in Japan is nama biru, which means draft beer. I drank very little sake while I was there, I just stuck to nama biru. I’m kind of a fan of milder beer anyway, so Asahi and Kirin are just great for me. I can imagine that I would get a little old after months and months, though….

Oh, she also taught me dai jobu, which basically means “It’s ok, don’t worry about it.” I didn’t expect there would be many people saying sumimasen or gomen nasai to me, but by golly it turned out to be pretty handy, both in telling other people to relax, and realizing that they wanted me to relax over some faux pas.

Junko was a huge help in seeing a side of Japan you can’t get to without a local guide, and she is super friendly too. So of course I said sure! when she wanted to get together again later in the week. She’s busy studying computer science stuff, but we got together again on Friday and Sunday. What a sweetie! 

Preparing for the trip, flying (up ’til April 16)

When I quit my job in the middle of December, the plan was to take some time off, travel, relax and decide what to do next with my life. But people asked about my first destination, I pretty much drew a blank. The list looked something like this: Eastern Europe, Japan, Italy or France for cooking school, a NE US trip and maybe one or two trips to “someplace tropical” for scuba diving or snorkeling. I felt free to add other trips later as they occurred to me, but even with that short (!) list I couldn’t decide where I wanted to go first.

My guess is that I decided I wanted to try to see cherry blossoms in Japan before they were gone, so I scrambled around and got reservations at a few places to stay, got plane tickets, and went on a crash course in “what do I want to do in Japan?!”

Tokyo and Kyoto were pretty much guaranteed stops, and after a little bit of browsing I came across awesome descriptions of the “onsen” experience, so that got added too. Reservations were a little tricky to get online, but it worked itself out over a few days, and I relaxed a little. With the schedule of where-I’d-be-sleeping settled, the next step might have been to figure out what to do during the days. But after skimming around a few books on the matter, I felt pretty confused about what I wanted to see and how best to go about seeing it, so I ditched most of the books and stuck with a very slim Lonely Planet book on Tokyo and a not-much-bigger book on “Old Kyoto” recommended by some friends.

When I got settled in my seat for the 10-hour flight to Tokyo, I pulled out a few notes and tried to figure out where I was going, and what would be Up once I got there.

Q: What do I want to see/do/experience in Japan?

A: Hm….

So, I pretty much procrastinated planning the trip until the very last minute, and then found that the books I’d brought weren’t really suited to the task of leading me to what I’d hoped to do and see. The lil’ Tokyo book was no more than 120 pages long, and the Old Kyoto book focused mostly on crafts, not the gardens and museums that I really hoped to see there. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just wing it.” So I did.

I wrote down a list of things I’d like to do in Tokyo: Baseball game, rush hour, early morning Tsukiji, Kabuki, Noh, TIC/Ginza, Harajuku (Sat/Sun), Edo-Tokyo museum, music, stock exchange, movies, Sony HQ, DVD/electronics shopping, Sushi, 7-11, sake museum, Kaiseki, kobe beef, ramen, eel, soba, Hama Rikyu Onshi-Teien, Yasukuni shrine.

And for Kyoto: gardens, museums, scolls, ceramics, lacquerware, combs, oden stem, Ryoanji, woodblock prints, rice cracker, soba, chopsticks, eel.

I felt like these lists gave me a pretty good slice of old and new Japan, and that if I did even 1/3rd of the list I’d be pretty happy. The rest of the time could be spent sitting on the sidewalk watching people go by, and that’d be OK with me, because on most of my past vacations I’ve ended up “wasting” wide swathes of time doing essentially nothing while I either slept, wandered lost, sat on a log resting my feet or simply sat watching people go by. Traveling with other people is almost worse… time “lost” to congressionally determining what’s to happen next is quite a bit less satisfying than quietly sitting on a bench watching foreigners go about their lives.

After so much time watching people in Britain, France, Germany, China and Japan, I’m starting to realize how much I’m affected by the illusion that I’m understanding much about people by watching them on the street, shopping center, subway or park. Each has a distinct feel, and I go back home thinking that I’ve learned something significant by watching them bustle, but on this trip I mainly grew more skeptical about my ability to grasp much about a place without speaking the language. My command of Japanese is mostly useless, and by the time I left I felt that I was just peering at Japan through a tiny pinhole. What I saw was fascinating, but I don’t have my younger confidence that seeing people strolling along was giving me deep insights into similarities and differences between they and moi.

Having said all that, I’ll mention that what I mostly did on the flight was study Japanese. Before leaving, I’d worked on remembering the hiragana I knew from high school, and had brushed up on a few politenesses. But on the plane I really hammered away on some vocabulary and a few more pithy phrases that might come in handy.

Which train goes to _____?

How much is it?

Please give me _____.

more

less

Numbers 1-30, 100, 1000

I’m pleased to meet you!

Verbs for: eat, look, sit, go, give, walk, sleep, pay, buy, listen, say

Colors: red, blue, yellow, black, white, green, orange

Today, tomorrow, tasty, morning, afternoon, evening, night, sky, moon, sun, tree, star, garden, big, small, beautiful

I can speak a little Japanese

It was horrible. Almost nothing is similar to any words I already know, and I had the distinct feeling that it would all be swept away with my first night’s sleep. In fact, most of the words I studied I held on to pretty well during the trip, reinforced by my bullheaded habit of using them whenever I saw the slightest opportunity. Most Japanese people did not find it helpful, interesting or welcome that I would sometimes point to an object and state its color, but I did it anyway.

The words I really wish I’d practiced more were the verbs…. sigh. Give, take, sit, stop, stay, wait, etc…. all would have been helpful. Oh well. I’ll try harder for Italian.

Landing in the airport, I changed money, got a train ticket to Tokyo, and managed to get into the city OK. Transferring to various subways to get to my hotel was trickier, especially as I got sleepier. After I finally got to the correct subway exit, I spent — no joke — 1-2 hours wandering around the neighborhood looking for my hotel. It’s comic now and was thoroughly ridiculous and appalling at the time. None of the landmarks on their little map made any sense to me, and Japanese streets are notoriously unnamed and of varying block length.

I bundled into my pocket-sized single room, and slept happily on the stiff futon.

My mosey through Japan

This post will act as your guide through the various Flickr sets and blog posts I’ll make about my Japan trip. If you’re the selfdirecting sort, just click around in the blog and Flickr however you like. If you’re the hurried or barely interested type, click this link to see my favorite photos from the trip, and leave it at that. If you’re type A, follow the links in the order below to do things chronologically.

Flickr photos are here.

Schedule:

Preparing for the trip (up ’til April 16)

Tokyo (April 17, 18, 19, 21, 22)

Hoshi Onsen (April 23)

Takaragawa Onsen (April 24)

Kyoto (April 25, 26, 27, 28, 29)

Tokyo again (April 30)

Further observations go here…. someday.