Tokyo, Day 2
It was the 29th, a Tuesday, and we all got up early. Really early: we were out before most restaurants opened! (I have neither recollection nor record of the exact time. I think it was around 6:30 that we got out, but one of my companions might set me straight....) It was a moist morning, so we were glad to find umbrellas available to borrow from our ryokan. We spent a little while on the street trying to sort out where we were and where we wanted to go, and eventually got help from a random Japanese stranger. Then, however, we decided to get some food before we set out. We were at a major intersection, and across the street was a corner shop selling foody things, so we went in and got some.
The foody things in question were bento and the like, along with a variety of triangular rice balls with stuff inside. They had colour-coded labels, which would have helped if we had any idea what the colour-coding scheme was: but there was no such key, and we wound up choosing at random. Green was, as expected, some sort of vegetable. I got a blue one, which I assumed would be fish, but turned out to be a creamy thing something like chicken or tuna salad. I did not care: it was yummy, and filling enough.
We proceeded to the nearest Metro station and got day passes, and proceeded from there to the famed XXX fish market. This would give the impression of being in a warehouse except that it was far too big for that, and that it had no walls, just a roof. We had hoped to get there early enough to see the bidding for the best catch, but the fishermen (and the people they sold to) got up even earlier than we did. What we did see was a sort of organised chaos, with people everywhere going everywhere else, often motorised, and staying politely out of one another's way. Many of the people were on these funny little truck things that looked like a dolly with an oil drum in front and a door-shaped vertical board behind: they stood, with their backs to the board, and held a ring around the top of the oil-drum thing like a steering wheel. The oil-drum thing contained an engine, and the whole thing, drum engine and wheel underneath, turned. Behind the board was enough flat space for several crates' worth of fish, which was generally what one found on the flat space. The result was effectively a very small, very maneuverable pickup truck, and these things were everywhere, including and especially in the narrow aisles through which the rest of the people were wending to do their shopping. We took several pictures, including at the very end pictures of the sign telling us not to take pictures... oops!
After that we wandered around a little, eventually gravitating to a coffee shop. I got an iced matcha with coffee jelly, which was quite good, if a little expensive. The rest of us got coffee, mostly iced. It was around this time that we discovered that Japanese coffee is (a) generally pretty good, and (b) really, really strong. As in, probably twice the concentration one expects in North America. This resulted in one of our group being quite bouncy for most of the rest of the day.
Our next destination was the Imperial Gardens. This was a bit of a walk, and the day had already gotten hot and very, very humid, but we did not mind so much. Everyone sweats in the Japanese summer, a lot, and it is just an aspect of human biology that everyone there seems to acknowledge and accept. People walk down the street with handkerchiefs, which are frequently employed to mop the face, and most have fans. These do not actually reduce the sweating much -- they merely make it tolerable. I am not sure why I did not mind it so much: I grew up with this sort of humidity, and hated every minute of it. But somehow it was just part of life here.
The Gardens were impressive in the same lush green sense that I had been appreciating all over Japan, and indeed Tokyo. There was not much by way of flowers; rather, it was a very well-manicured array of grass, shrubberies, and trees. We explored some of the buildings, an area for which required that we obtain tickets to enter, but no payment was required for that. Instead we got little plaques that we were to give back on our exiting the area. I can only surmise that there was some sort of survey being taken: which entrances and exits were used most by visitors, perhaps, or how many people visited in a day. It was very relaxing, inasmuch as one can find relaxation in near-body-temperature mugginess. There was also an art museum, with a fairly small exhibit that included a pre-World-War-II statuette carved out of wood, with a verse carved into its base... in German. Nobody had an explanation for that one.
From there, we went to get lunch. We picked another place off the main road, in which we were once again the only obviously non-Japanese people. This one had full-colour pictures in their menus, and so we were able to order by pointing. Once again, the food was really good and really cheap. All of us were beginning to wonder where Tokyo's reputation as an expensive city came from!
After that, we steeled ourselves and headed to the Akihabara Electric District. For those non-otaku reading this, Akihabara is the geek mecca of Japan, where anime and electronics collide in very loud ways. There were all sorts of shops everywhere. You could buy Ethernet cable by the metre. You could get amazing deals on used laptop computers. (I seriously considered getting one for angharad except that bringing it back for any problems might be an issue.) There were cosplayers, both amateurs and professionals. There was an eight-storey bookstore, in which I discovered that probably three fourths of all Japanese book spines are fluorescent. I also discovered that, while most things are generally published in the traditional Japanese binding style, in which one reads the book "backwards" in comparison to Western binding, technical books tend to be printed in the Western style. We wandered around, looking at everything and buying almost nothing: the place itself was entertainment enough for this visit!
Eventually Akihabara-induced sensory overload conspired with our lingering jetlag, and around six or so we regrouped and headed back to our ryokan for showers and naps. Much refreshed from that, we headed out to dinner, and had our first encounter with what I can only describe as a mall street. This is a regular road with an awning overhead, so that while the ends are not in any way gated or curbed, and indeed cars sometimes drive through, the "floor" is tiled as often as paved, and pedestrians pretty much have the run of the place. The roof means that weather is not much of an issue (and indeed it was raining pretty heavily when we were at this one), and at night it is lit brightly enough to seem almost like indoors except for the slow muggy breeze through the place. Lining the street are wall-to-wall shops, much like along a strip-mall. It was almost ten at night when we got there, and we got to see the spectacle of the salarymen out to get themselves smashed: one kept walking into a wall while his friend tugged at his sleeve to help him negotiate his way into (probably yet another) bar. At the same time, lots of places were closing, so we considered ourselves somewhat lucky to find an affordable-looking restaurant still open.
That was an experience that lives in infamy, in two ways. First was the people we were near. We were seated in a booth, with a hanging cloth separating us from the next table over, and that table was occupied by a group of very noisy people who we eventually sussed were laughing at our expense. It was the only time in our trip that we heard Japanese people using the word "gaijin". Formerly, and still in many usages, this word means "foreigner" the same way that "nigger" means "black" -- derogatorily, to say the least. Nowadays it is a bit more polite, but still carries some connotation of "barbarian". The party (in both senses) next to us seemed good-natured in a drunken sort of way, though: I felt amused more than abused, and after all I was a mostly-clueless foreigner, visiting a very different culture. Still, Japanese politeness eventually won out, as soon after we realised that we were the subject of the other group's ribaldry, they left; we suspected very strongly that the waitstaff tossed them out when they caught on to the nature of their conversation.
The other infamous aspect of that dinner was what was served. We all ordered set dinners, which included things like rice and miso and various tasty things, and each was offered a choice of pineapple or natto. I swear that I had mentioned natto to our group before, but I guess I had not made enough of an impression. One of the others, one who ordered natto, said that she should have realised that it was a mistake when I ordered the pineapple instead (having lived in Vancouver for two years, I had some experience with Japanese cuisine!). The pineapple was amazingly good. The natto was, well, natto. Natto is fermented soybeans, which have a slimy, firm-but-mushy texture and a putrid smell. Picking one of the beans up leads to long stringers of slime sticking the bean to the mass from which it came. The flavour is hard to describe. Suffice to say that it comes in waves, probably four or five of them, each unpleasant in a way unanticipated by the one before. All but one of us tried some (I did merely to remind myself of exactly what the stuff was like, with the side benefit of the shared sympathy of my comrades); the one who refused was taunted by that for the rest of the trip. One of us put up an admirable struggle, eating fifteen of the nasty things, but most of it went uneaten.
And that was that: it was late, and we were once again getting tired. So we headed back, ready for more tomorrow.
The foody things in question were bento and the like, along with a variety of triangular rice balls with stuff inside. They had colour-coded labels, which would have helped if we had any idea what the colour-coding scheme was: but there was no such key, and we wound up choosing at random. Green was, as expected, some sort of vegetable. I got a blue one, which I assumed would be fish, but turned out to be a creamy thing something like chicken or tuna salad. I did not care: it was yummy, and filling enough.
We proceeded to the nearest Metro station and got day passes, and proceeded from there to the famed XXX fish market. This would give the impression of being in a warehouse except that it was far too big for that, and that it had no walls, just a roof. We had hoped to get there early enough to see the bidding for the best catch, but the fishermen (and the people they sold to) got up even earlier than we did. What we did see was a sort of organised chaos, with people everywhere going everywhere else, often motorised, and staying politely out of one another's way. Many of the people were on these funny little truck things that looked like a dolly with an oil drum in front and a door-shaped vertical board behind: they stood, with their backs to the board, and held a ring around the top of the oil-drum thing like a steering wheel. The oil-drum thing contained an engine, and the whole thing, drum engine and wheel underneath, turned. Behind the board was enough flat space for several crates' worth of fish, which was generally what one found on the flat space. The result was effectively a very small, very maneuverable pickup truck, and these things were everywhere, including and especially in the narrow aisles through which the rest of the people were wending to do their shopping. We took several pictures, including at the very end pictures of the sign telling us not to take pictures... oops!
After that we wandered around a little, eventually gravitating to a coffee shop. I got an iced matcha with coffee jelly, which was quite good, if a little expensive. The rest of us got coffee, mostly iced. It was around this time that we discovered that Japanese coffee is (a) generally pretty good, and (b) really, really strong. As in, probably twice the concentration one expects in North America. This resulted in one of our group being quite bouncy for most of the rest of the day.
Our next destination was the Imperial Gardens. This was a bit of a walk, and the day had already gotten hot and very, very humid, but we did not mind so much. Everyone sweats in the Japanese summer, a lot, and it is just an aspect of human biology that everyone there seems to acknowledge and accept. People walk down the street with handkerchiefs, which are frequently employed to mop the face, and most have fans. These do not actually reduce the sweating much -- they merely make it tolerable. I am not sure why I did not mind it so much: I grew up with this sort of humidity, and hated every minute of it. But somehow it was just part of life here.
The Gardens were impressive in the same lush green sense that I had been appreciating all over Japan, and indeed Tokyo. There was not much by way of flowers; rather, it was a very well-manicured array of grass, shrubberies, and trees. We explored some of the buildings, an area for which required that we obtain tickets to enter, but no payment was required for that. Instead we got little plaques that we were to give back on our exiting the area. I can only surmise that there was some sort of survey being taken: which entrances and exits were used most by visitors, perhaps, or how many people visited in a day. It was very relaxing, inasmuch as one can find relaxation in near-body-temperature mugginess. There was also an art museum, with a fairly small exhibit that included a pre-World-War-II statuette carved out of wood, with a verse carved into its base... in German. Nobody had an explanation for that one.
From there, we went to get lunch. We picked another place off the main road, in which we were once again the only obviously non-Japanese people. This one had full-colour pictures in their menus, and so we were able to order by pointing. Once again, the food was really good and really cheap. All of us were beginning to wonder where Tokyo's reputation as an expensive city came from!
After that, we steeled ourselves and headed to the Akihabara Electric District. For those non-otaku reading this, Akihabara is the geek mecca of Japan, where anime and electronics collide in very loud ways. There were all sorts of shops everywhere. You could buy Ethernet cable by the metre. You could get amazing deals on used laptop computers. (I seriously considered getting one for angharad except that bringing it back for any problems might be an issue.) There were cosplayers, both amateurs and professionals. There was an eight-storey bookstore, in which I discovered that probably three fourths of all Japanese book spines are fluorescent. I also discovered that, while most things are generally published in the traditional Japanese binding style, in which one reads the book "backwards" in comparison to Western binding, technical books tend to be printed in the Western style. We wandered around, looking at everything and buying almost nothing: the place itself was entertainment enough for this visit!
Eventually Akihabara-induced sensory overload conspired with our lingering jetlag, and around six or so we regrouped and headed back to our ryokan for showers and naps. Much refreshed from that, we headed out to dinner, and had our first encounter with what I can only describe as a mall street. This is a regular road with an awning overhead, so that while the ends are not in any way gated or curbed, and indeed cars sometimes drive through, the "floor" is tiled as often as paved, and pedestrians pretty much have the run of the place. The roof means that weather is not much of an issue (and indeed it was raining pretty heavily when we were at this one), and at night it is lit brightly enough to seem almost like indoors except for the slow muggy breeze through the place. Lining the street are wall-to-wall shops, much like along a strip-mall. It was almost ten at night when we got there, and we got to see the spectacle of the salarymen out to get themselves smashed: one kept walking into a wall while his friend tugged at his sleeve to help him negotiate his way into (probably yet another) bar. At the same time, lots of places were closing, so we considered ourselves somewhat lucky to find an affordable-looking restaurant still open.
That was an experience that lives in infamy, in two ways. First was the people we were near. We were seated in a booth, with a hanging cloth separating us from the next table over, and that table was occupied by a group of very noisy people who we eventually sussed were laughing at our expense. It was the only time in our trip that we heard Japanese people using the word "gaijin". Formerly, and still in many usages, this word means "foreigner" the same way that "nigger" means "black" -- derogatorily, to say the least. Nowadays it is a bit more polite, but still carries some connotation of "barbarian". The party (in both senses) next to us seemed good-natured in a drunken sort of way, though: I felt amused more than abused, and after all I was a mostly-clueless foreigner, visiting a very different culture. Still, Japanese politeness eventually won out, as soon after we realised that we were the subject of the other group's ribaldry, they left; we suspected very strongly that the waitstaff tossed them out when they caught on to the nature of their conversation.
The other infamous aspect of that dinner was what was served. We all ordered set dinners, which included things like rice and miso and various tasty things, and each was offered a choice of pineapple or natto. I swear that I had mentioned natto to our group before, but I guess I had not made enough of an impression. One of the others, one who ordered natto, said that she should have realised that it was a mistake when I ordered the pineapple instead (having lived in Vancouver for two years, I had some experience with Japanese cuisine!). The pineapple was amazingly good. The natto was, well, natto. Natto is fermented soybeans, which have a slimy, firm-but-mushy texture and a putrid smell. Picking one of the beans up leads to long stringers of slime sticking the bean to the mass from which it came. The flavour is hard to describe. Suffice to say that it comes in waves, probably four or five of them, each unpleasant in a way unanticipated by the one before. All but one of us tried some (I did merely to remind myself of exactly what the stuff was like, with the side benefit of the shared sympathy of my comrades); the one who refused was taunted by that for the rest of the trip. One of us put up an admirable struggle, eating fifteen of the nasty things, but most of it went uneaten.
And that was that: it was late, and we were once again getting tired. So we headed back, ready for more tomorrow.