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 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.