Tokyo

7/11 - Landing at Narita and Shibuya Crossing

After an uneventful flight, we landed at Narita Airport outside of Tokyo. We had a set of the things we needed right off before doing anything else. Get SIM cards for our phones (or a portable wifi - big in Japan apparently), get cash and get our JR passes.

JR (Japan Rail) passes are basically unlimited train tickets - you pay a bunch upfront but then don't have to pay anything more for trains throughout Japan. However, you have to purchase them outside of Japan, bring the purchase order with you, then redeem the purchase order at a JR office in Japan. Getting the purchase orders was one of the few things I had managed to do ahead of time, as planning ahead is really not a strength - and even as it was, getting the order involved some last minute calls and racing to a travel agent office.

After getting all of our bits and bobs, we headed for the train to the city (already being able to make use of the JR Passes). Checked into the hotel and rested for a moment. It was getting to evening as we headed out with a plan to walk around a little and grab a bite.

We decided to stop and get something to eat, it would be our first attempt at navigating food in Japan. We went in to Uobei Shibuya Dogenzaka - sort of a fast food type of place. When we arrived, there was a short wait, so we took a seat on their waiting 'bench' where you scoot along, moving around the U until it's your turn. There was a woman running a monitor that had all of the seats in the restaurant shown and colored either green, yellow or red. Green were the open seats, yellow were those being turned and the red had active customers. When we got our green lights, we were given seat numbers and we went to sit down. In front of you sits a touchscreen menu, and behind the touchscreen are 'rails'. TThe best part, is that after you figure out how to order, your food is delivered via a tray on those rails. 

7/12 - Tsukiji Fish Market, Meiji Shrine and Takeshita

We started the day by walking from the hotel to the Tsukiji Fish Market. I always enjoy walking around when traveling. It allows you to see some of the subtle differences that when summed up, really contribute a lot to our impression of that place. In Japan, the design aesthetic and messaging of the various signs throughout the country were a source of constant fascination that started on the days first walk. I think if I spent the trip stopping at every sign the way I did the first day, we may not have made it to half the sights on our list... Everything from custom water main covers to the color choices for a no smoking sign all left an impression on me.

The Tsukiji Fish Market has been around since the 1920s and hosts around 900 vendors and wholesalers. It's more famous for the fish and vegetable auctions that take place everyday - in particular the tuna auction, which apparently auction off tunas the size of submarines. The auctions are open to the public, but the process for getting in was quite a bit more than Sam and I were will willing to do - as it involves getting in line at 1 am for a 15 minute time slot to the auction at 6 am, probably not the best way to deal with jet-lag. It would have been neat, but we went the route of just going to the market to wander around and grab breakfast. It was here that Sam was introduced to a cubed egg thing on a stick - sort of an omelette/scrambled egg deal served cold. I went for the liquid nitrogen cooled strawberries on a stick. One note on the market, this may actually be the last year it is in its current location, as the city is looking to move it for reasons of sanitation tangentially related to the olympics, so it was neat to see it before it moves.

After whiling away the morning in the market, we headed over to our first shrine of the trip - Meiji Jungu. One of my misconceptions, or perhaps ignorances, that I encountered had to do with what a shrine was. To be honest, it wasn't something I spent a lot of time thinking about, but I had the conception of a shrine as being a single thing or building - perhaps similar to a cathedral. However, the shrines we went to were complexes of buildings, temples, gardens and gates (torii). Our first shrine on the trip was the first to expose this.

Meiji Jungu is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, the first emperor of modern japan after the restoration of the emperor over the shogunates in the latter half of the 1800s. Shintoism is still the predominate religion in Japan, though only slightly edging out Buddhism. However, the line between the two religions is blurry at best with many people adhering to parts of both.

Next up, off to the samurai museum. We didn't really know what to expect from this one, but it ended up being interesting and informative. From what our guide said, it was basically one guys personal collection that he decided to turn into a museum. Fair enough, he put it together pretty well. The tour starts with a martial arts demonstration by a resident samurai and continues through various artifacts and lectures about those pieces.

Interestingly, I got to try on some of the samurai armor - including the 4 kg helmet. I guess like medieval armor, it wasn't exactly the most practical type of outfit.

Dinner on the second night introduced us to yakitoris. Grilled chicken places (although they pretty much grill anything) that all seemed to have their own attitudes. This one was one of my favorites. We pointed at stuff on a menu and ate our fill as the smoke spilled into the alley. Delicious.

After dinner we went over the the Tokyo National Municipal Building. You can go up to the observatory for free (apparently, as no one charged us anything). From the top we got some great views at Tokyo at night.

Even the makeshift 'do not enter' setups have a fantastic design aesthetic.

7/13 - Tokyo Nat. Museum and Hanging with Aaron

We got a reasonably early start the next morning as we were planning on meeting up with an old high school friend of mine who now lives in Japan, but we were hoping to sneak in a visit to the museum first - as well as get tickets to a baseball game.

Getting tickets to the game might be my proudest achievement in navigating Japan, and I actually didn't do that great of a job of it - in fact, if it weren't for sam forgetting her sunglasses, I would have screwed it up. So, to get tickets, you can buy them from an English language travel site, but in order to do that, you need to plan out well in advance and you have to pay something like a $60 service fee per ticket. Tickets only cost $20-$30... If you are in the country, you can go to a convenience store like Lawson's or 7/11 and find a Loppi ticket machine. Problem is, unless you are doing one of the limited English options, baseball not being one of them, you have to navigate the machine in Japanese (In hindsight, of course, I probably should have just waited until we me up with Aaron...). The cool thing is that you can buy tickets to events pretty much anywhere in Japan, like a baseball game in Osaka when you are at a store in Tokyo. I had read that you can get tickets from these machines, but that was pretty much it. So when we arrived at our local Lawson's, I figured we'd give it the ol' college try and maybe someone would take pity and help us out as we struggled. Using the Google translate app we were able to slowly step forward (with multiple steps back as well) until we were close to buying the ticket. [note: the Google translate app is both remarkable and annoying - it ends up being a word game. For example, trying to figure out that 'second elephant parking' means 'parking lot B' has an logic to it, but isn't always helpful in the moment.] Well, actually, the first time we almost bought what I think were parking passes to the game... but eventually the machine printed something out and we thought we were good to go. Luckily, Sam brought us back to the hotel where I asked the ladies at the desk to confirm we had done it right. Her English wasn't great (we weren't staying in an area overflowing with tourists), but she did manage to communicate that I didn't do it right and that I had to go back and talk to the cashier at the Lawson's. Apparently it was a two step process, and that you have 30 minutes from the time of getting the printout to talking to the cashier before you lose your reservation for tickets. Long story short, we got tickets. Hooray. I hope you've been as enthralled by this story as I was.

Once we had the actual tickets in hand, we jumped on the trains to head across town to the Tokyo National Museum. As an aside if you are ever in Tokyo; I would recommend staying in the Shibuya area or next to the Tokyo train station. The latter is best for whatever you are going to be doing. Honestly, not a lot in the area itself, but you pass through that station constantly. Shibuya has more walkable things to do, but isn’t ideal for getting to other areas. That stated, almost anywhere near a station is fine, transit in Tokyo is great.

On our way out of the museum there was a small vendor in the museum courtyard selling one of the most delicious drinks to have on a 100 degree day – Sprite with a ton of small ice cubes made of mango. Highly recommended summer drink in any country. Spike it with gin and you’ve great the greatest desert cocktail.

We made our way to Shinjunku and met up with Aaron. After a quick lunch, we headed to Hamarikyu Gardens for tea. It’s a sanctuary in the middle of skyscrapers and generally considered one of the most beautiful gardens in Tokyo. The teahouse is in the middle of a pond at the end of a bridge. You go in and sit on the tatami mats and are served delicious tea cakes and matcha tea. It is a really pleasant experience; I wouldn’t have minded it being a bit cooler, but I suppose it was preferable to rain.

Following tea, we wanted to visit an art gallery that had a more modern modern Japanese showcase. The typical place would be the Suntory museum, but whatever the show was didn’t interest me too much, but nearby was the 21_21 Design Sight with an Audio Architecture exhibition. Along the way, we took a moment to dip our feet in a odd little stream in Hinokicho Park that was setup for the purpose.

The exhibition itself was rad. Overall quite simple, but we still spent a decent amount of time watching each video from a different artist to the song created for the show.

Dinner that night was great. The food was good, but the experience was better. Walking into the restaurant, we ran into an issue Sam and I would encounter a few more times – the restaurant basically wanted to turn us away because they wouldn’t be able to communicate with us. I mean, fair enough. We didn’t speak or read Japanese, and they certainly shouldn’t be required to have English menus for us. However, since Aaron was with us, he was able to get us in and was willing to help us put orders in. On a side note, the waiter that ended up helping our table did actually speak English decently. And he seemed quite happy to practice with us when he could. We ended up talking about baseball for whatever reason – and he was a big fan, just not of American baseball and he asked us if we were Yankees fans since we were from New York. I told him that I liked the Cubs and Twins and he was excited about the Twins and said that going forward he would have them as his team. So Twins management and players, you are welcome for a new fan.

Aaron had a bus ride to catch (he is now living in Nagano), so we parted ways and wandered back into the park to see it nicely lit up.

We still had a bit of energy left, so we headed out to visit Sensō-ji temple. At night, you aren’t able to go inside, but the grounds are open and the temples are lit up and create a fantastical sight – well worth the visit. As it turned out, we never ended up seeing these temples during the day, so it was a great decision, especially with the cooler evening temps.

7/14 - Mistakes, Snakes and Fireworks over the Lake (okay, its a bay…)

Yesterday’s trip had inspired a change of plans for the day as we wanted to hit up another museum and would lead to my biggest mistake of the trip, or at least the dumbest one. A quick check on which we should go to had us headed to the Nezu Museum. We trudged through the heat quite a ways since there wasn’t a particularly close station (at least on the lines we traveled for free on due to our JR pass). When we arrived at the museum, we found that it was closed from July 9th into September for remodeling… The worst part is that I knew this. In my initial research this museum had been cut out because of it. So given that we were standing in the relentlessly unforgiving heat and had used up quite a bit of time getting here it was a tad annoying. I guess that is part of the downside of not being proper planners.

We decided to head back to Takeshita street to get a better look at everything there and maybe actually go into a store or two. On the way we stopped at a snake café for a coffee and to stare lovingly at our table guest. Animal cafes are everywhere in Japan, but we saw by far the most in Tokyo. Cat cafes, owl cafes (we actually tried to go to one of these but it was full), dog cafes, etc.

Takeshita street was again quite fun. If you want crazy cat t-shirts or dresses with odd English translations/words, this is your place. Sam picked up some snoopy chop sticks and a dish in which an image of a dog appears when you add soy sauce.

Neither Sam nor I are particularly big fans of anime. Every time I’ve watched it, I’ve loved it - Akira, Ghost in a Shell, Howl’s Moving Castle - but beyond the most famous I’ve never properly dove into it. So while we would have liked to have gone to one of the great indie anime museums, we thought it would be a bit lost on us. However, we still wanted to at least explore this, so we found a kid friendly, though very informative animation museum, Suginami Animation Museum. It had an exhibit tracing the historical timeline of Japanese animation and had a lot of clever exhibits like the desks of famous animators. And unlike the National Museum, here the audio guide was incredible. We were surrounded by children the whole time, but it was exactly what we wanted to see.

While having coffee with snakes, we discovered that there was a fireworks show that evening in Yokohama – the Sparkling Twilight festival. It wasn’t very clear what the festival was about, or what would be there, or really much of anything, but fireworks are fun. So we went.

Yokohama is about an hour away by train from where we were. On its own, its quite a large city, 3.7M, and has a history as the first Japanese port open to foreign trade; Americans would probably know it better due to it being the military home base post WWII through the Korean war. We didn’t explore it much in the end, as we went straight to the festival and basically just hung out in the park drinking beers while we waited for the sun to go down, but it is a place I’d be interested to go back to for the jazz and food scene there. The schedule for the fireworks said they would be from 7:30-8. This was really our first – of many – instances in which we learned that event times are taken very seriously. At 7:30 on the dot the music started playing and fireworks started launching. The sizeable crowd filled up every inch of the park and ooh’d and aah’d excitedly. The participation of the audience was definitely part of the fun. The fireworks show itself was hugely impressive. It was certainly comparable to anything I’ve seen in NYC over the 4th of July. Dead-on at 8pm, the show ended, the crowd cheered and everyone made their way out of the park. It was an unexpected, but very enjoyable end to a day that started in predictable failure while also marking a nice closing to our time in Tokyo.

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