I had somehow forgotten that no one in Tokyo speaks English and had incorrectly assumed that we could ask around Ginza Station to find the exact location of our hotel. You see, I used to think that the only reason I couldn't find anything in the city without using sights and subway stations as relative waypoints was because streets were only signposted in Japanese. But, it turns out that most streets in Japan don't even have names. Because of this, addresses in Japan mean very little. They generally include a neighborhood name and then three numbers that narrow it down to a single building without ever referring to a street. Google Maps is useless in Tokyo because it doesn't understand the system.
But! We found a sweet touch-screen guide-map inside Ginza Station that went as far as to tell us which exit to take out of the subway station to get to our hotel. (Note: This is not trivial. We were exit A13 from the selection of A1-A14 and B1-B10.) Go Japan.
Our room in the (first) hotel was absolutely tiny, something I wrote off as a genuine Tokyo experience. I'm not going to write much about most of the following four days because mostly I just wanted to make sure Adam knew where everything in the city is and a lot of it was a repeat of my trip two years ago: crazy Japanese virtual sports center in the Tokyo Dome, views from the 50th story of the Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku, "Lost in Translation" sightseeing in the Park Hyatt Hotel, walking around at night in the Times Square-crushing lights and crowds of Shibuya, conveyor belt sushi, shopping and anime-crazed people watching in Harajuku, old Tokyo and temples in Asakusa, wandering in the back alleys of residential Bunkyo-ku, pandas in Ueno Zoo, and a Yomiuri Giants baseball game in the Tokyo Dome.
We visited the main showrooms for Toyota, Nissan, and Honda. We saw a performance by ASIMO, a robot at Honda who actually runs (as in, both of his feet leave the ground at the same time), rode in a Toyota that drove itself around the compound, and saw a union protest at Honda.
We also saw a day of sumo. I don't have terribly much new insight to add to my writing from last time. No huge upsets/mat throwing this time, but somehow the sumo itself was more interesting. I think I'm getting to the point where I could watch it as a sport and not just a cultural experience. It's a great spectator sport and the crowd was predictably riled up.
On our last free day, we decided to shell out for tickets to a drifting competition. It was more than worth it. The track was entirely enclosed by eight sets of bleachers and was essentially a straightaway leading to a gentle 180-degree turn, followed by a series of increasingly sharp turns inside the curvature of the first turn. It was a very tight track and drivers predictably spun out and crashed into the walls more than once. The format of the competition was actually very clever and made drifting into a scorable sport. I had never really understood from “Fast and the Furious” how you were supposed to “race” when drifting. They had 32 drivers set up in a bracket. Each pair would drive twice, each driver getting to lead once. The second driver’s goal was to stay as close and as parallel as possible to the lead driver’s car through the turns. Clearly, this gave the first driver the incentive to drive as fast and recklessly as possible. It also set up scenarios where a particularly bad first run made drivers on their second runs get too aggressive and spin out/crash, or alternately, amazingly drift within inches of the other car through each turn. Judges scored the pair of runs. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The crowd was boisterous, the announcing was overblown in a campy way (think Japanese game show), exhibits included crazy car body kits and remote control cars that drift, and the campground food was both predictably greasy and predictably Japanese.
Then I went to work for five days.
I used our last night out to reminisce in Bunkyo, where I had lived two summers ago, and then Shinjuku, that neighborhood that had so thoroughly blown my mind my first night during that trip. In many aspects, Tokyo is just like every other worldly financial center (Hong Kong, London, NYC, etc.), but it really, truly, is a place of its own. Shinjuku perfectly embodies it for me. It’s bright, busy, shockingly seedy, completely inaccessible, and yet one of my favorite places in the world.
I had a really hard time writing this entry. I am so thoroughly convinced that Tokyo works as a place that I feel as though I have nothing specific to say about it. I cut a lot of this entry because of that. It sounded boring, even by the standards of this blog. So, all I’ll say is: go. It’s hard to convey Tokyo in one piece of writing because it’s all about small experiences, like having a woman leave her shop to walk you a block to the correct subway entrance. I think Adam’s movie of our trip will do a better job than I can. Here’s the trailer.
My walk in Shinjuku was two Fridays ago. Then, I was home for exactly 23 hours, and was in New York City by that Sunday night.
P.S. Watching Adam's trailer reminded me of something. In Ueno Zoo, in the worst zoo planning fail I've ever seen, they put the seals by the polar bears. Every time the seals made any kind of noise, the polar bears went nuts. I felt so bad for them.
I love the small British side streets. They're all over the place, lead into enclosed squares and neighborhoods where it's impossible to have cars. This is Faulkners Alley:
If I ever become a rapper, I'll be The Viscount Slim:
And St. Paul's Cathedral, where I wandered into evensong, which is a night mass conducted entirely (at least the portions I heard) by the chorus. It was charming...and free, which is unfortunately a complete rarity in London. I'll take a tour to climb into the dome at one point. I also now eat lunch on the steps of the cathedral most days:
I love the double-deckers and I'm starting to get to the point of familiarity with the city where I'm learning which bus routes are faster than tube routes -- the two systems are supposed to be complimentary after all. I took a bus cross-town to ride past some touristy places until I saw what I thought was a political rally or speech on Trafalgar Square so I frantically got off the bus...
...and then I realized that the large crowd (I didn't take a picture that really does it justice -- I'd guess it was thousands) was watching a film version of a recent production of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Opera. Unreal, this would never happen in the U.S.
