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.
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