day seven in tokyo and home

last full day in tokyo: i had breakfast at the coffee shop down the street w/ jonathan, where i was able to successfully order hot cocoa and a croissant in japanese (made easier by the fact 'cocoa' and 'croissant' in japanese are 'cocoa' and 'croissantu' respectively). home to get cleaned up and ironed and pressed and dressed and ready to go out w/ j's host family from 15 years ago; we took the train out to erisu (sp?), had half an hour to wander around a super super posh clothing store (i saw a pair of shoes i quite liked that cost $900, and a t-shirt that was $250), and then met up w/ his host mother and host sister and host sister's little girl aged 2 for a delish lunch at a non-weird-fusion italian restaurant. (posh little portions, tres elegant, white linen). a bit fragmented, because we were all on good behavior; eugene was the only one who spoke japanese and english really well; the little girl was antsy and fussy and couldn't sit still, so her mum was constantly up and down taking her outside; but still, very nice to have the chance to sit down and talk to regular people and not just be a tourist (in which regard i feel i have been extraordinarily lucky this trip, actually). ooh and i totally scored w/ the little girl because i knew the words to the greeting song and the donkey song from Music Together (thank you, Theo Scott Ebling) which is apparently an international phenomenon, not just a hippie california thing.

after lunch we headed back to central tokyo to meet up w/ eugene's friend/girlfriend eriko for coffee and a little tour of some of the modern architectural marvels of downtown tokyo, and then they dropped me off at a bathhouse while they went to shop for medicines-only-available-in-asia for various family members. eriko came into the bathhouse with me just to get me started, which was very sweet of her, because i'm sure that otherwise i would have committed even more horrendous bathhouse faux pas than i did. it has the look and feel of a very small public swimming pool minus the smell of chlorine; first you go into a locker room, where you undress and stow your stuff; then you go into the bathing room, where you sit on an upturned plastic bowl and scrub yourself under the shower (apparently you have to make a big show of how extensively you are scrubbing yourself, and how much soap you are using, for the benefit of all the other ladies who are keeping an eye on that sort of thing.) then you get to get into the actual bath, which is like a giant jacuzzi, totally lovely and steamy and peels your skin off. afterwards you shower off again, dry w/ the tiny flannel that you had to buy from the front desk because you didn't know that the regulars all bring their own towels, get dressed (i treated myself to a 20 yen hair-dry under one of those bubblehead hair drying machine that i associate with hair dressing salons from the 1950's.) and then you're done. my main faux pas (at least that i know about) came when i was towelling off - there are little mats that you stand on to dry off in front of your locker, and i did not managed to contain my drips to the mat, but accidentally got a few drips of water on the floor, and a lady came in, pointed at my drips, let off a tirade of pissed-off japanese, glared at me, and went round the other side of the lockers so that she would not have to step over the foreigner's unsightly puddle. oh dear oh dear. anyway.

after that the others picked me up again and we headed off to a famous sushi place (famous in part for the wait, which is an average of two hours yikes). but a two hour wait does at least have the effect that being seated gives you the most tremendous rush of victorious smugness, and the food was quite yummy. home again home again after that - jonathan and eugene went out for late night carousing, i crapped out and went to bed, and that was that.

jonathan left the next morning; i spent the morning wandering around the harajuku area in the pouring rain, checking out the flea market and the crazy teeny bopper shops and the handful of anime enthusiasts who turn up in their freakiest manga finery (think foot high red leather platform boots, black leather trench coats trimmed with rhinestones, crazy wigs, corsets, spikes, floor length punk mullets). i also went to the meiji shrine nearby, where you can go and pay respects to the emperor and his family, which according to the signs all patriotic japanese citizens like to do regularly), and then went home to pack my stuff, say goodbye and thank you to eugene, and get myself to the airport (1oo% completely successful train experience. correct ticket purchase, correct bullet train boarded, correct seat located, and i even got off at the right terminal). and thus ends my first ever trip to japan. flight home medium horrible - i was sitting next to a pair of hindu grannies who fussed with their video remote controls in loud voices and pulled out tinfoil packet after tinfoil packet of pungent homemade chapatis to eat during the flight, but i managed to sleep, which is really the definition of a good transoceanic flight, i think.

day six in tokyo

again, a veeerrrrrryyyy sllloooowww moving day in which very little of cultural import was achieved, but meh, whatever, it's vacation.

after breakfast, we headed out to the ginza shopping district, so that i could go to itoya, which is a mega paper store that got rave reviews in the guide book. i was a bit disappointed because it seemed to be mostly office supply type stuff until we got to the fifth floor and then it was japanese art paper HEAVEN and i sat on the floor and poked through all the drawers of gorgeous hand printed rice and silk paper and drooled (but neatly, so the shop attendants wouldn't get cross). after being very restrained about _not_ buying the entire shop, just 3000 yen worth or so, we went to a matsuzakaya for lunch - one of the big department stores with a food court in the basement where they have the $150 cantaloupes etc. we did not, you will be relieved to hear, have the $150 cantaloupe for lunch, but instead went to the little pseudo italian cafe in the basement; there is apparently a long tradition of bizarre low budget italian/japanese fusion cuisine that jonathan very properly felt i should be introduced to. i had pasta with mushrooms and cheese with seaweed sprinkled on top in a little bit of broth.

after lunch, we parted ways: J. went shopping, and I went to the Imperial Palace in the hopes of wandering around the gardens, which were supposed to be very nice. Unfortunately, it was the emperor's brother-in-law's day to get his hair cut, or something, in honour of which the gardens were closed to the public, so i had to settle for a wander around Hibiya Park, where they were setting up for the annual Oktoberfest celebration (of course. Tokyo in May. Oktoberfest. duh.) and then to the Hama Rikyu gardens down next to the water, which were quite pretty. I was very tickled that at fifteen minutes before closing, they start playing a lush orchestral version of "Annie Laurie" over the loudspeakers in the park, so that everyone knows to make their way to the exits. Ooh, I forgot to say, swimming around in the moat of the Imperial Palace I saw two turtles (!), a crane, and several fatty orange koi.

Home for a snooze, and then out with Eugene and his friend Mai for what has to be one of the most delightfully weird food experiences of the trip. Eugene didn't give us much of a hint as to why he wanted to take us to the this particular place other than to say they had really good ramen (I will never, by the way, be able to eat a Top Ramen or variant ever again now that I know what proper ramen is about). So we get ourselves to a slightly seedy but absolutely hopping street with loads of cheapy shops and bars and African pimps out on the street hustling for business (a totally weird demographic distribution that I don't even begin to comprehend, but never mind) and Eugene takes us up a couple of flights of stairs of an undistinguished looking building until we find ourselves standing in front a vending machine, from which we order our basic bowl of ramen (noodles plus two slices of pork included) plus any additional extras (green onions, mushrooms, egg, fish, other mystery ingredients). The vending machine spits out little paper tickets, which you then take inside. Just inside the shop there is a display board with stall numbers lit up to show you which ones are free; you pick a number, and sit yourself down in a totally private little booth, just you. There is a bamboo curtain between you and the kitchen, and you slide your tickets under the curtain, and a a few minutes later an anonymous pair of hands delivers your custom bowl of ramen to you, which you slurp down in complete and total privacy. if you have ordered extra noodles, for example, there is a little button that you can press to let them know when you are ready for the noodles, and the anonymous hands appear again from the kitchen and deliver your noodles, all without saying a word. It's basically a perfect arrangement for complete social phobics, who want to go out to eat a really good bowl of ramen without ever having to talk to - or even look at - another human being. it was totally weird and i loved it.

after dinner we went out for karaoke wooHOO! fun. we got a private little room and our karaoke machine had all the requisite cheesy music videos, flashing lights, and a good selection of japanese pop (mai and eugene), 90's pop/rock (jonathan), 70's motown (me), and dumb musicals (everyone) to keep everyone happy. a good time. home in a taxi by midnight, at which point i went to bed crosseyed with exhosstion and the boys went out for another drink down the street, just because they could. and so, another day.

day five in tokyo

well, we are starting to wind down the frenetic pace of sight seeing of the first few days - the jet lag is almost conquered, so we aren't getting up until 8 or 9 in the morning; we've discovered a cafe down the street that has croissants and coffee, which means another hour or so before we can get moving, etc...

yesterday we were EXTREMELY slow moving and didn't actually get out of the house until noon; breakfast at the cafe was followed in quick succession by lunch at a funny little asian/french fusion restaurant off Omote-sando (where I managed to splatter blueberry sauce all over my shirt. I went into the loo to try and wash it off and managed to go from having a splotchy purple shirt to having a soaking wet splotchy purple shirt, so i gave it up as a bad job and wore just my jersey for the rest of the afternoon, which meant that i was sweating buckets the whole rest of the afternoon until my splotchy shirt was dry enough to put back on because it was really hot out).

After lunch we went to go check out some of the trendy high end fashion houses (Comme des Garcons: Salvation Army dress shirts chopped up and sewn to Salvation Army 1970's knit vests, with $500 price tag put on; Prada store (nifty immaculate white bubble building, nice but unremarkable clothes). Tokyo is definitely a fashion-watcher's paradise; while the uniform for men is eerily standard (black suit, white shirt, dark tie, briefcase), the women are all kitted out in some quite astonishing outfits. lots of lace, lots of frills, lots of very short hemlines, lots of bling, and everyone in regulation 4" stilettos.

In the afternoon, we went to the National Theatre to go to a bunraku traditional puppet performance - us and a whole crowd of Japanese oldies with their buzzing hearing aids and their immaculate old-lady kimonos. it's kind of fun - off to the side of the stage are two guys sitting cross-legged on pillows; one plays twangytwangy bits on his traditional instrument thing which i can't remember the name of, and the other guy does all the narration/voices for the puppet play (they switch out the narrator at each act, and the most skilled/famous narrators get saved up for the climax of the play). the stage itself was set with a fairly simple set of the interior of a traditional japanese house, and each puppet (about half human size) is moved by 3-4 guys dressed in black and dark grey. you apparently have to train for years being in charge of just one foot before you are allowed to even have a crack at the hands or head of one of these puppets. the play was a (apparently fairly well-known) melodrama, along the lines of boy meets girl, boy is supposed to have arranged marriage with someone else, the honor of various families is compromised, suicide is threatened all round, parents' wishes are denied and tragedy ensues as a result. very realistic, i think, no? anyway. it was fun. i had an english audioguide thing to help so i knew what was going on, and i did my best to transcribe it as i went along so that jonathan could also follow (the japanese they use is i think quite antiquated??), so i now have an unintentionally hilarious 8 pages in my diary of bunraku transcript, along the lines of

- it's dude from oil shop

- dad is mad! says go away

- oil shop dude says you stole my money

- no i didn't

- and your daughter's fiance had an affair w/ the boss' daughter

- daughter says i am going to kill myself now

- sick mother says who's there what's happening

- father says here have some plum blossoms as a peace offering.

i am sure it will all still make loads of sense hundreds of years from now when bunraku historians are trying to piece together what it all looked like.

after the theatre we had an umbrella retrieval adventure - all shops etc have neat racks outside where you can leave your umbrella when it's raining, and the theatre is so fancy (or perhaps theatre patrons are so untrustworthy) that there were actually little mini locks so you could lock up your umbrella and take the little key inside with you. when we came out of the theatre, we discovered that the entire umbrella stand had gone missing, along with our umbrellas (strictly speaking eugene's umbrellas; we had each brought our own plain black ones from california, but we both had serious umbrella envy of eugene's clear umbrellas, which are all the rage in tokyo, so we had borrowed those for the day). we went around backstage and tentatively hallooed (ok, jonathan did, in japanese) to see if we could retrieve them, and a very nice guy in flipflops and a fag hanging out of his mouth came out and was very sweet about trying to understand what on earth we needed, a process which was not helped by the fact that neither of us knew the japanese word for umbrella. (it's "kasa" for anyone who ever needs to know. as in, if it's raining, mi kasa es tu kasa.) eventually lost umbrellas were found, everyone was pleased, lots of thankyous and bowing to each other (people really do bow all the time, or at the very least do a lot of head bobbing, which i find intensely charming), and we were on our way.

we went to shimbashi (sp?) station to meet up w/ machiko (bernat's wife), and the old black train which is in the middle of the square as a kind of museum exhibit is not only THE place to meet in tokyo (there were loads of people lined up in rows next to it, looking expectant), but you stand on different sides of the train depending on whether you are a nonsmoker or a smoker. it's all very organized, and presumably all without anyone actually saying anything.

machiko turned up, and although japanese people don't seem to ever actually touch each other (at least in public - no handshaking, no hugs, no cheek-kissing; you just bow) i gave her an enormous hug without thinking about it, which was kind of funny, considering we had never met, but it just felt like the right thing to do, and if she thought it was weird, she didn't say anything. we went to a gorgeous funky little izakaya restaurant where she had made reservations, and eugene turned up shortly afterwards, and we had a very nice time. it was a little tough conversationally, because her english is quite limited (and despite jonathan's best tutelary efforts, my japanese has remained limited to please, thank you, hello, yes, and orange juice), but she seems like a very cheerful nice person and in the end we managed fine. (also i was very brave and ate a fish eyeball. it was gluey with a little bit of crunch to it). after dinner we went to one of the nearby sky scrapers that has a really speedy elevator with a view over the city (terrifying and puke-inducing and whooshily futuristic) and then out to a parfait place for bowls of tea-flavoured ice cream and mochi. jonathan had a large bowl of what looked like slimy bright green brains, which sent him into raptures of childhood nostalgia. he is weird. then we all went home to bed the end.

day four - kyoto continued!

Day four:

This morning we were LATE FOR BREAKFAST oh dear oh dear. We had asked for breakfast at 7:30, and we were still in our room getting ourselves sorted at 7:31 and the phone rang, and it was the front desk lady saying, where are you we are waiting for you for breakfast, so we hurried downstairs and if you can imagine the horror, started our breakfast a full three minutes after the appointed time. If they spit in our food to punish us for our tardiness, you couldn’t tell, however, since it was the most aesthetically beautiful breakfast I have ever eaten. After the hot hand towel thing (which I love), we got a lacquer tray with nine little lacquer bowls each with a different exciting thing (fava beans, tiny little mini fried fish, lotus stem, pickled mystery vegetable, etc.), followed by a big still-bubbling thing of rice porridge with two raw eggs and a yuzu citrus fruit in it that they mixed up in front of us to cook the eggs and infuse the whole thing with citrus flavour), and then a little plate of the most gorgeous perfectly cooked cod ever, and finished up with green tea.

After breakfast we headed out to the imperial palace complex, where the emperors of Japan lived for nearly a thousand years until the capital was moved to Tokyo. Despite the fact that it is a UNESCO world heritage site blah blah blah I didn’t honestly think it was anything all that special (except for the gardens and the few painted screens that you could see through the open doors (you are not actually allowed in the palace buildings, just around the grounds). I found the architectural style a bit bleak and austere, especially set in acres of flat white gravel, and with the exception of a few ornate carved bits along the roofline, it did not give the impression of antiquity at all; it looked to me for the most part as if it could have been constructed in the 1970’s. (Jonathan was totally blown away about it, and said that was the point, it was timeless, and reflected the philosophical ideals of simplicity) and we ended up getting quite cross, arguing over aesthetics and what makes things beautiful and form vs. function etc., J. being passionately pro modern minimalism, and me preferring a more organic antique lumpiness (I don’t think it’s a simplicity vs. gaudiness, quite; for instance I much prefer plain stone early Romanesque churches to later cathedrals that are all gilted up with enormous chunks of gold everywhere, although I will admit that I was ready to move in to the Bangkok Royal Temple when I saw all the crazy colored glass and detailed mural paintings and elephant statues everywhere.) My theory is that a lot of it is gender difference - I can think of an awful lot more men than women who go for the very clean, spare, cool, rectilinear look, and a lot more women than men who prefer bright rich colours, curves, warmth, soft edges, elaborate detail. I will continue to collect data, in any case.

After that, we took the train out to Arashiyama, on the outskirts of Kyoto, and had okonomiyaki omelets at a little sit-at-the-counter grill place (egg, cabbage, pork, squid, green onion fried into a patty in front of you, and then topped with mayonnaise, seaweed flakes, and mystery spicy powder). After lunch we walked along the river in the misty (slight) rain, which was very pretty, through a gardeny foresty area to the estate of an old Japanese silver screen movie star who had designed this rural retreat for himself and then bequeathed it to be used as a park after he died. Narrow stone paths led through little hidden gardens, all beautifully kept, and we had the entire place more or less to ourselves because of the rain. I think that might have been my favourite thing that we have seen so far. At the end of the walk through the gardens there is a teahouse place where you get given a cup of green tea and a rice cookie by a nice lady, (again, with beautiful peaceful view out the open screen window to the bamboo forest) and I sat and tried to sketch the beautiful peaceful view but it is HARD when there are a million leaves everywhere and not a lot in the way of definite lines to help you plan the drawing.

Anyway. After that to the costume museum (J. complained, I insisted, only took half an hour, beautiful little doll’s houses w/ dolls in authentic period imperial costumes), back to hotel to pick up bag, bus to train station, and now on the train back to Tokyo, having consumed our train ’snack’ of a bento box of beef sushi, a plum roll, a raisin scone, and a sugar bun…

day three - kyoto!

Day three (Tuesday): we took the bullet train to Kyoto (massively expensive, scarily efficient, with departure and arrival times accurate to the minute). It was a little bit exciting at first because we actually got on the wrong train (a bullet train going from Tokyo to Kyoto that left three minutes earlier than our train did - we should have known) but the conductor was very nice and sorted us out properly, giving us an incomprehensible book of apparently every single train going in any direction anywhere in Japan at any time during May 2010 which was very helpful, especially to me. However, we did manage to get on the correct train eventually and we were in Kyoto by late morning, and checked into our guesthouse, which was BEAUTIFUL - a traditional ryokan set in a gorgeous landscaped garden, water features everywhere. There was a lot of shoe removal - first you have to take off your street shoes and put them in a little wooden locker at the bottom of the stairs, then you have a pair of leather slippers to wear up the stairs (they did not have any big enough for Jonathan. The lady had to go get a special pair which they probably keep in a safe somewhere for when really tall people come to stay, and he still had three inches of heel hanging off the back), and then when you go into your room (beautiful room with traditional shoji screens and tatami mats and a low tea table) you take off the slippers. We had tea poured for us while they explained the bath procedure (different wooden shoes, special kimono outfit) for the traditional baths downstairs (more on that later) and then we ventured out.

We took the bus to Kinkakuji shrine, which is a gold painted templey arrangement set in the middle of a lake with very pretty surrounding gardens (this is going to sound very clichéd, but everything looks so eerily like a Japanese print, with cherry trees and pines and Japanese maple trees and little pagodas and artistic clumps of rocks everywhere, that it is quite surreal). From there we walked to Ryoanji, another shrine-within-pretty-gardens down the road, which is famous primarily for a rock garden which consists of a bed of perfectly groomed white gravel with fifteen seemingly randomly placed boulders set in it (the trick is that it is impossible to see all fifteen at once unless you are “truly enlightened,” (or really tall, or have a helicopter, maybe), and so you are supposed to sit there and meditate upon the meaning of that. It was a little difficult to concentrate on my meditation when there were school groups of about two hundred navy-uniformed adolescents shrieking at top volume and taking pictures of each other with their fingers held up in a V on their cell phone cameras, so instead we gave up and just wandered around the gardens (again, exquisite) and into the tea shop, where we ended up having a very nice lunch. The food wasn’t particularly memorable (tofu and vegetables with some additional fun mystery ingredients, all immaculately laid out on trays, the whole elegant tea thing) but the setting was to die for - we were sitting cross legged on little cushions at a low table, and through the open screen window we had a view of the beautiful garden with babbling water feature (with carp sub-feature), stone statue feature, etc.

After all that peaceful meditative simplicity, we decided to amp up the crass capitalism, and we headed to the shopping arcade, which is targeted to the broadest demographic range of any shopping mall I think I have ever been to. There were loud video game arcades, where you could put money in a slot to win a chance at a large scary pink fluffy animal bigger than yourself, elegant little confectionery shops, a place that sold fruit and vegetable seeds, a print shop that sold old maps and prints (I definitely did not go in and spend more money than I really should have in that one), a home decorating fabric store, fresh fishmongers with burly guys slapping around in rubber aprons and wellies, florists, high end clothing boutiques, etc. We also saw some fashion to prove that the Japanese are not all conservative conformists when it comes to clothes: Jonathan spotted a guy wearing a pair of Micky Mouse ears, a mini skirt and tights, with large calf length furry boots, and I was impressed by the number of teeny bopper girls who were dressed (frankly) like prostitutes (ripped lace, garter belts, hot pants, bras) who couldn’t possibly have been prostitutes because a) they were so many of them and b) to all other respects they looked like gangs of teenage girls just hanging out with their friends in the evenings. (Ooh, we also paid a visit to a department store to confirm Eugene’s story that in posh department stores here you can buy single perfect cantaloupe melons that cost $100 - he is wrong, they sell for $150, and they come nestled in their own little Styrofoam fluffy thing with a gold sticker and a pink or blue ribbon on them, as if they are newborns in a nursery.

By eight pm the shops were closing up and our feet were about to fall off, so we headed back to the hotel for a nap and a bath; we couldn’t have a nap because they hadn’t put out our beds for us (I forgot to mention when we first got our room, there were no beds because the futons are kept in a special cupboard) so I went downstairs to try out the bath thingy. First you have to get dressed up to go down there in your special kimono dressing gown business and slippers, and then when you get down there you undress again, and then you have a shower before you can have a bath, and finally you get to have a bath in this enormous beautiful stone tub with citrus fruits bobbing around in it so that everything smells like orange blossoms (even my feet, by the end of it, which was quite a, er, feat). The water is super hot so you hop in and out between the cold shower and the boiling bath, and then you get back into your dressing gown and slippers and go back upstairs, to find that they still haven‘t put the futons out because they can‘t believe that you are so pathetic as to need to go to sleep at 8:30 at night and besides Jonathan was getting that cagey/sheepish I-was-sort-of-thinking-about-going-to-get-some-more-food look (we had opted against an official dinner because we had been snacking on street foot all afternoon) so… out of the dressing gown, into street clothes again, and out we headed, this time to a little noodle shop down a dark hidden alley way full of gorgeous funky old wooden two story traditional houses (passing three bona fide geishas on their way to work, accompanying an elderly guy with a cane, which got me thinking all kinds of inappropriate and vulgar things, but which I know is not really the point of geishas, it‘s all about the ceremonial and cultural bits blah blah blah). Yummy udon noodles with spring onions in broth, then staggered home to bed, where they had finally put out the futons with blissful white fluffy duvets and I was asleep in about thirty seconds flat.

day one and two in tokyo!

Hello, everybodies! So… after a mad dash through San Francisco airport to catch my flight to Tokyo (which was exciting primarily for the fact that a) I got upgraded to executive class, doubtless because I looked like such a high-powered individual in my stretch pants and thermals and b) I found out what your eyeballs feel like after watching four movies in a row without a break) I arrived on Sunday evening in Tokyo! I miraculously found Jonathan (thanks to J’s brother Eugene and his prompt telephone triage), who had also arrived without incident, and we took the train to Shibaura Island, where Eugene lives. Tokyo city trains and subways are very exciting, especially if you don’t really know where you are going, but we did magically end up in the right place and Eugene found us and took us home to his immaculate and stylish little bachelor pad with a gorgeous view of the river and the city in the background from the 23rd floor. Everything (trains, apartment, roads) looks like a slightly surreal gleaming vision of the future - everything is super clean and swishy and works perfectly. I bet the relative percentage of GDP that comes from manufacturers of “Out of Order” signs is very, very low (as opposed to tailors of dark suits and white dress shirts. I calculated today that there are probably around 250 million dress shirts in the Tokyo metropolitan area alone).

Anyway. The night we arrived, Eugene took us out for dinner at an izakaya restaurant (specialties: meat on skewers and alcohol) and I did my very best to remain upright. In addition to meat on skewers and alcohol, we ate: daikon radish salad with dried bonito flakes, fried chicken, beef tendon soup, ramen with raw egg and onion and probably some other things that I am forgetting (ooh, we are passing Mt. Fuji on the right side of the train right now - it’s a beautiful clear day and there is a bit of snow right on the top lovely lovely). Then we went home and went to bed and it was so completely delicious to be showered and fed and sinking into a big clean fluffy duvet mmmmm.

Day two (Monday)

We woke up early in the morning (partly jetlag, partly because they don’t have daylight savings time here so the sun comes up at 4 a.m.) and took advantage of being wide awake at 5 am by catching a taxi to the Tsukiji fish market to watch the morning tuna auction. The fish market is a gigantic maze of about a square half mile that rivals a Jacques Cousteau type nature program for making you appreciate the vast diversity of stuff that comes out of the ocean. Every so often I get depressed about how there is really no point to traveling any more because everything is Starbucks and 7-11 everywhere, and then you go some place like the Tokyo fish market and you think, oh, hm, perhaps you would be hard pressed to find fish that look like translucent pink legless miniature crocodiles at the Safeway in Santa Rosa, much less translucent pink crocodiles that are fresh caught and that they will prep for you. The trip was made much more exciting by the frequent near death experiences; about once every fifteen seconds you nearly get run over by a man in gumboots and a rubber apron driving a mini trolley at 70 mph through the narrow aisles of the market, with three enormous (as in the size of about an eight-year-old child) headless tuna-fish on the back.

After the market we went to a ramen place for breakfast; all I have to say is that now that I have had proper ramen I will never be able to look at a dried Top Ramen packet again without feeling superior and sniffy. We crammed into a little divey caff with everyone lined up at the counter on stools (approximate leg room: six inches; average femur length of the Hsiao/Stanton traveling party: thirty inches) and got enormous bowls of yummy broth with big fatty noodles, pork chunks, tofu, and mystery vegetables, all of which guaranteed that the next stop was a search for a loo for Jessica “strongest gastro-colic reflex in the West” Stanton. Luckily, it’s Japan, so there are immaculate, gleaming, functional, public toilets everywhere, which I have decided is the truest hallmark of high civilisation. Forget cultcha, it’s all about the lavatories.

After breakfast we tried to go to a famous gardeny thing nearby, but it was still only quarter to eight in the morning, so instead we headed up to the Asakusa district where we walked along a famous shopping street (famous primarily for things to eat. There is a certain delightful predictability about traveling with Jonathan…) and then went to a lovely old temple/shrine place where we got our fortune told by a piece of paper that came out of a slot in the wall (unfortunately it wasn’t that good; it basically told us to beware of everything) and lit some incensey things to make a wish and then went and sat and had a coffee. Ooh, I almost forgot; they have little pancakey things with bean curd in the middle that have the shape of pagodas and dolls and things, and they have a little stampy machine that pours out the hot dough and cooks it and we had several of those, hot off the presses.

Next stop was a wander around leafy shady Ueno Park, which has a beautiful seventeenth century shrine in the middle of it (as well as gleaming immaculate flush toilets, natch) and I had a snooze on a bench while Jonathan organized us. For a city in which gazillions of people are crammed into not-that-large a space, there are quite astonishing large quiet expanses of space with almost noone in them.

After that we took the train to the sumo wrestling arena, and got tickets for the sumo wrestling tournament that is going on this week (?) month (?). I don’t know even how to begin to describe it: the arena/stadium thing is quite big, with seats for maybe four or five thousand people. The wrestling ring itself is on a square platform down in the very middle, about fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with a circle marked out with straw ropes on the ground, and then the most expensive seats are red cushions on the floor right around the ring. The next most expensive are the ‘boxes’, which are tiered steps marked off by low brass railings, and each box has four floor cushions and a tray for tea (!) in it, (we sat in one of these until the stadium began to fill up) and then up in the balcony are the regular theatre type seats (where we ended up).

The wrestling itself is something else; it is weirdly compelling. Everyone involved (wrestlers, referee, guy who calls out the name of each wrestler before they go up into the ring, judges (?) who sit around the edge of the ring) is traditionally dressed in their own profession-specific fabulous outfit. Each bout starts off with a parade of all the wrestlers who will be competing; twelve or so men, ranging from solid to terrifyingly obese, dressed in tassled loincloth-y arrangements and huge elaborate aprons with their long hair lacquered up into a topknot, come out and arrange themselves around the ring and do a few synchronized stamps and claps all together (interestingly, although the audience went nuts when one or another of the wrestlers was announced, the wrestlers themselves were extremely stately; there was no playing to the crowd or indeed even recognition of the crowd at all). Then they all file off again and go and sit around the edges of the arena, and the name-calling guy comes out and does sort of a Gregorian chanty thing, calling out which wrestler will be “East” and which “West”. Then those two come up into the arena, and the referee (splendidly dressed in a huge shiny kimono and fancy hat) has them bow to each other, and then they do some more synchronized stamping and clapping and stretching and throwing of salt (?) down onto the floor of the ring and they slap their bellies and wipe their faces and armpits off with special cloths that their helpers give them and then after a lot of that they finally squat down facing each other, fists on the ground, and then at a signal that I could never figure out suddenly they charge at each other. It’s quite scary when they do, because these are big, big dudes, and the thwack as they body-slammed into each other made me jump every time. Some of the time the wrestling was very fast and violent - there’s a lot of face and neck slapping and grabbing - and sometimes they would come to a complete stop, arms around each other, each with a hand hooked around the loincloth of the other, and it would look oddly tender. The bout was over either when one guy was down or had been forced out of the straw ring, which usually took anywhere between five and sixty seconds, and then the process would repeat itself with the next two wrestlers. As the afternoon progressed, each match became more elaborate (the outfits, the amount of time spent belly slapping and salt-throwing and stamping before they fought) and the crowd got more and more excited. Interestingly, there were several non-Japanese wrestlers, including a Serbian guy, whom we saw fight a couple of times. The tournament goes all day every day for a fortnight; we stayed for about four hours (we had a fortifying bento box for lunch) and it was quite hard to tear ourselves away, (even though I was in desperate need of a nap) as the whole thing is oddly compelling.

Home for a nap before dinner, and then Eugene came home and we went out for dinner with a friend of his from work to an amazing tempura place. When I have had tempura in the US, everything gets brought out to you on one big plate, so by the time you get about halfway through everything is cold (in fact the last time I had tempura, in San Francisco when I was interviewing for residency I got really sick afterwards and spent the whole night puking, which is why I don’t usually order tempura when I go to Japanese restaurants). Here, however, we sat at a counter, and the two chefs did everything right in front of us, so you ate everything about fifteen seconds after it had come out of the oil and was deliciously hot and crispy and light. We had a fish tasting menu, and I have absolutely no idea what most of the things were that we ate; there were a few familiar items (tiger shrimp, shallots, eel) but mostly I shut my eyes and thought of England, and it all turned out fine. (I think my favourite was at the very end: ice-cream tempura in a blueberry dipping sauce. Not very sophisticated of me, but if you deprive me of dairy for a couple of days, ice-cream tastes really really good. (I just asked Jonathan whether they make icecream lactose free here because everyone is lactose intolerant, and he said he didn’t think so, with the justification that, “it’s a culture that enjoys suffering.”)

After dinner we went to a tiny (as in five feet by ten feet square) bar in the Golden Gai area, which is a slightly seedy area of very narrow streets and ttiny atmospheric little dive bars piled on top of each other. We climbed a set of very narrow rickety stairs to the second storey; there were two guys already in there, so the four of us plus the proprietress meant a full house. It was like the Monty Python cheese shop sketch; every drink that anyone asked for, she would come up with a reason why we couldn’t or shouldn’t have that (the Coke is warm, it’s not a good brand of vodka, we’re out of that beer) until we ended up with OJ (me) and camparis and soda for everyone else. She also gave us little bright red octopus tapas and chatted to us about having lived in France. (I was strongly reminded of Douglas Hofstadter’s story about a day he spent touring a Polish radio station: first he was taken around by someone who only spoke Polish, and he only speaks one or two words of Polish, so there was a lot of just grinning and nodding; then he was handed off to some else who spoke some Russian, of which he knew maybe 50-100 words, so the ability to communicate was somewhat improved, then he was supposed to interview someone who happened to have some German, which he speaks decently although not marvelously, then French, which he speaks really well, then Italian, which he speaks really really well since he lives in Italy and is married to an Italian I think, and then finally he ends up that evening hanging out with some American friends and is back in his native tongue, and he describes at each stage the relief of improved communication and the sensation of brain-opening as he moved up each level. I thought of that because it was an unusual feeling to be _relieved_ that someone spoke French - like, wow, I can have an exchange with someone that consists of more than just bowing and grinning like an idiot and saying thank you over and over again. (While my spoken language skills are still limited to hello, please, and thank you, my written Japanese, I am pleased to report, is bounding ahead by leaps and bounds; I now know about twenty characters and today I reached my goal of being able to decipher an entire phrase unassisted. Are you ready? Here it is: “Vehicles enter this direction,” posted outside the parking lot of a restaurant. Jonathan criticises me for doing the pen strokes in the wrong order, if you can believe it, but what does he know.