Long Blog is Long

Spring break part one! I went to Tokyo for the first part.

Before I left for Tokyo on another accursed night bus, two things happened: one, my iphone broke on a bus, when I tripped and dropped it with remarkable force and accuracy, and two, I forgot my camera heading out the door. So, no photos for this next part, a pretty big part.

Anyway... I arrived in Tokyo after very little sleep at 5:30 AM. I went to Ueno first, which is kind of a park-ey area, though the “central park” of Tokyo is the Imperial Palace, which is off limits to the public for the most part - which strikes me, as an American I suppose, as completely insane. Anyway, Ueno has a big park. It’s famous for its cherry blossoms, which were just starting when I was there, and a the National Museum, which is where I planned to spend as much of my day as possible. Anyway, Ueno Park is terrifying at 5:30AM. Lots of hobos. Though not everyone sleeping on the ground was a hobo! Some people were there to snag a spot for sakura viewing later, by sleeping there. Also: freezing out. Also: a huge group of people was doing synchronized Tai-chi or something. Kind of freaked me out.

Because the museum was closed I decided to ride on a train, where it was warm and I could sit down. I went around the Yamanote line twice or so. The Yamanote line is a super famous train line that goes through a lot of famous districts, and is notoriously crowded, though on a saturday morning it wasn’t hard to find a seat. So, I watched people for two hours - the national past time of Japan is not, as you may have heard, video games and anime, it is looking fabulous in public. People get really dressed up, and ride around in trains, pretty much. Great people watching.

Eventually the museum opened and I made my way back, and spend four-ish hours wandering around. Lots of amazing Japanese art, with a room devoted to each kind of traditional Japanese craft - the katana, laquerware, kimono, dolls... lots of great stuff. A little light on the ukiyo-e, though, which I love, but there was a great Hokusai instantly recognizable as a Hokusai, of a particularly crafty looking eagle. Maybe there’s more of that usually - there was a big building undergoing renovations. There was also a big archaeology part, and a building devoted to statues taken from a particular temple, which was perhaps the most amazing part. Also a garden with some tea houses. Japan has a system of “national treasures” and the less important “valuable cultural property.” Every item in the museum is tagged with its appropriate rank. Quite a lot of Valuable cultural property, and a few “national treasures,” which they make a huge deal out of. Japan also has “living cultural treasures,” which are people who are masters at a specific Japanese craft or art. None of those in the museum, though they did have some pottery by these living masters.

Outside the museum again there was, bizarrely, in the park, a Japan / Pakistan friendship festival. I had seen the booths when I was there early in the morning but didn’t know what the hell was going on. So, unexpectedly, I had a really great pakistani-food lunch. Naan is great. I don’t get enough Middle eastern food. Also that day: weird bodily pains. Right after I ate lunch the inside of my right ear started hurting really badly, and hurt for pretty much the rest of the day. Before that, my eyes were really sore and producing a huge amount of sticky white eye goo. Maybe the air, maybe my body punishing me for not giving it any sleep.

I had gone to Tokyo to meet up with my brother, who was coming to Japan for spring break along with his Japanese teacher and some other students as a class trip. But he wasn’t coming till the evening so I rode around the loop one more time, went to Akihabara, the electronics-ey district, wandered around a used bookstore, went back to Ueno to try the western art museum, which I lingered in till it closed looking at its rather nice collection of impressionist paintings, including some nice Monet water lillies. Then I went to the nearest train stop to My/My brother’s Japanese teacher’s house, where I was going to meet them, and ate a hamburger and read until they were supposed to be there, then got picked up by my teacher’s cousin at the subway stop. They had just gotten there ten minutes earlier. That was the first day.

The next two full days, when I was with my teacher and tagged along with their trip, were quite fun. However I have kind of forgotten the exact order everything happened in. This is my best guess of how it all went down.

The first morning I’m pretty sure we went to Meiji Shine, first... which is a shrine. Famous, I guess. Caught a very traditional Shinto (in Japan, shrines are Shinto and temples are Buddhist) wedding procession in progress, and threw some coins in the collection box and did the traditional clapping/bowing thing. My favorite part was reading the emas, which are wooden boards people write wishes on in shrines. They’re always in Japanese, but Meiji Shine is a pretty famous tourist attraction so there were some english ones, including one with “I wish I could become a pony and ride a rainbow” written in a kid’s handwriting. In general... I prefer temples to shrines, for some reason. Temples are more interesting to me.

Then we walked around Harajiku, which is right next to the shrine, and is famous for being kind of hipster/fashion oriented. There was a pretty great store of clothing for dogs. Other than that, though, full enjoyment of Harajuku was probably blocked my my Y chromosome. All the stores were A) expensive and B) for women, pretty much. After that... everybody made Kinpaku, gold leaf, which is a Traditional Japanese Thing. You put tape where you didn’t want gold to be and then used glue and a thin leaf of gold, peeled back the tape and then did a clear glaze for permanence. I did a little box. The lady at the store who guided us through the process - which was mostly devoted to really nice gold leaf things professionals had done - looked exactly like a Japanese version of my cousin. Exactly. Then we ate take out! And my brother and I watched the Big Lebowski, which is a great movie.

The next day we woke up at 4:30 or so to go to Tsukiji fish market, which is a really big fish market. We are talking about a very large fish market, containing a staggeringly large number of staggeringly large fish. Kind of sad, to me, in an environmentally destructive sense. Lots and lots of fish - big tuna, live squid in tanks, shellfish... you name it. One of the students on the trip’s father works for an associated company out of Seattle, so we got a behind the scenes tour, which was cool. They drive the fish around on these crazy carts! Also, you know how auctioneers are completely incomprehensible in English? They are also incomprehensible in Japanese. Then the fish company people treated us to lunch (fish) and took us to their headquarters for some reason. We asked some polite questions about their business, but the cool part of their headquarters is that it was right next to the Imperial Palace, and we got a cool view of it from above. They are a very, very large fish company, I guess.

That afternoon, we hung out briefly at the teacher’s house, then the girls in the group (which was only four students, by the way) went off to do a cooking lesson, and my brother and I and the other boy went off to go to a famous soba restaurant, which has been around for like 400 years, or something. It was delicious, though one of the servers was standing right next to our table the whole time - not because of us, but because we were near the door and he was a greeter type.

The next morning Erich and I split off from the group and took the Shinkansen south to Osaka, which is where I am. I think I’ll end this post here because it’s already quite long, but unfortunately we still have two more camera-less days before we get to anything remotely readable, a.k.a. something with pictures.