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.