Turning Japanese

These people aren't that small... but I could never fit in.

Guess where I am! Look at that, the majority of people who voted in my poll got their wish to see me in Japan (besting Korea and China). I do this for you guys! As I've said before here, I wanted to get to Mongolia, but that didn't work out. Best saved for my next big trip in five to ten years, when I can combo it with Russia.

A little Japanese humor for you.

A standard Japanese optometrist.

Go... Cincinatti? Carp?!

After almost a full day travelling by air, I landed at Tokyo Haneda airport. The trains to take me into the city were shutting down for the night, so it was a mad dash to navigate a city with minimal English translations, a kanji alphabet which might as well be from another galaxy, and very few people who could speak English, at least by European standards. And to top it all off, credit cards are infrequently accepted, so I had to find an ATM from which to debit tens of thousands of yen.

Which would you purchase?

After getting into the city, I still had to rush to my hostel before the reception closed for the night. But I was thirsty from dodging cars. I had totally forgotten that Japan drives on the left side of the road. And these peculiar vending machines kept popping up at every subway stop and street corner. What better way to try something Japanese than out of a vending machine? I picked what I thought to be the most foreign-looking product, the brown and yellow canister in the bottom row. It was a pineapple soda. Kinda weird. These vending machines are ubiquitous in Tokyo. They have become a part of their culture. You can use your subway card to make purchases from these machines. Each one has slightly different offerings. I bought five things out of these vending machines. The other outlandish flavor was a "milk and bean" ice cream from Seventeen Ice.

The premier sumo stadium, Ryogoku Kokugikan

The Tokyo Skytree

I had about twenty-five spots I wanted to visit marked on my gMaps, but no good plan of attack, given how the spots were spread all over the vast city. So I just started moving. A visit to the Ryogoku sumo stadium first was a no-brainer, since it was practically right next to my hostel. The sumo stadium has a free and informative museum comprised of a single room, but unless you're there for a sumo match, there is little else to see. I then made a long walk to the north edge of the city to see the Tokyo Skytree, the 2nd tallest structure in the world behind the Burj Khalifa which I had just seen briefly from my plane at my layover in Dubai. After the Skytree, I allowed myself west of the Sumida River into the main parts of the city.

Pagoda sculpture in the Happoen garden

The garden, "beautiful from all angles", was undergoing major upkeep.

The bonsai trees, some over 500 years old, were open for viewing.
This was my favorite.

The only thing you need to know about Tokyo is that it is very, very Japanese. There aren't that many tourists, especially white ones. Every stereotype we have about the Japanese you will come across in your first day there. The subways are very crowded - I completely avoided going underground during rush hours. Japanese businessmen run the streets in ironed white shirts and black pants during lunch breaks and off-hours. If they are feeling funky, they might dress in navy pants and tinge the shirt a slight off-white sky blue. Uniformed Japanese schoolgirls and boys take over after school. Dudes dress casually as if they were characters in a Final Fantasy and women lure you into their retail stores with their high-pitched voices and geisha outfits, while laughing daintily into their cupped hands. The women use parasols and personal fans to keep cool, but the men tough it out and wipe up their sweat with rags (humidity never dropped below 90%, every gust of wind was a godsend). You better be proficient in chop sticks because you are not getting a fork. They really do add an -u or -gu sound to the end of western words to make the words theirs. And I don't think this is a stereotype, but you should also know there are very, very few public trash cans - be ready to keep your trash with you.

Read on for all the other things you should know about Tokyo.

Senso-ji Temple

Not being able to read kanji meant that practically everything could grab my attention. I'm sure I spent time staring at the most dull signs just because I couldn't get over how anybody could learn to decipher the complex printed strokes. Everything attracts your gaze when you can't read any of it. Or when the English translation is complete nonsense. The West probably is just as bad when translating into Japanese. Most westerners become total imbeciles when landing in Japan (and any place that doesn't use the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, I bet). You cannot read a single thing. Like, I don't know more than one sentence of German but even so I could slowly decipher most of their printed messages if I needed. Not the case with kanji. What are you gonna do with "男の湯"? Good luck. I don't want to imagine how ridiculous our kanji tattoos sound.

All of these next pictures belong to the Senso-ji Temple grounds.

Pagodas are my favorite buildings at most shrines.

Historic temple to the Buddhist goddess of mercy

These pans for pulling up water can be found at many shrines.

Fortune cookies may not be a thing, but fortunes definitely are.

First stop after the Skytree was my first Japanese temple, of many, the Senso-ji Temple. Some of the temples struck me as wild and inspiring, but I have to say they grew dull pretty fast. Maybe that's because I don't understand the cultural significance, maybe because I don't appreciate the architectural development over the centuries as I do in the West, maybe because I can't read a single thing on the placards. I would like to believe the Shinto shrines are exactly analogous to western churches; I could not help but make that comparison. I personally find churches a whole lot more unique, from church to church.

Sengaku-ji, near the graves of the 47 Ronin

What else, what else... I found out at lunch that the Japanese love to slurp their noodles. Loudly. It was endearing initially but became gross over time. It's hard to go through a whole meal of hearing constant slurping. Is it a sign of politeness in Japan, that you are enjoying the meal?

The Tokyo Tower - I thought I left Paris!

Temple with Tokyo Tower backdrop to the right

The country really does feel very high tech. A walk through the center of the city has one high-rise after another of technology companies. The fancy toilets attest to it. A man could get used to heated toilet seats, but it's jarring the first time you sit on it. Nobody likes that feeling if you aren't used to it. The bidets actually serve a purpose here too, unlike Italy. They are conveniently built right into the toilet. Squirts right up the butt. And there are all these settings for changing the aim and water volume and force. I wish I could read the buttons.

But for as commonplace as advanced tech is in Japan, they don't take credit cards. What's up with that? So annoying.

Hello Kitty is in no shortage.

Two friends from Brown were in western Japan for a conference this week and had a little time to hang out in Tokyo the night before their flight home. I met up with them in the Shinjuku district for dinner and marveling at bizarre Japanese culture.

Neither are the pokemans.

One of many Times Square equivalents

Walking through Golden Gai alley with Kyle and Michelle

These two really helped me get acclimated to Japan.

Day two in Tokyo was mostly spent at the Tokyo National Museum. This would be my only museum stop (excluding yesterday's free sumo museum, which I'd say is too small to count) in all of Japan. I really wanted a museum devoted to the history of the country, and this was the closest I could find, even though its mostly for art. There was also the Edo-Tokyo Museum I passed on, which would be restricted to the Edo Period. The Tokyo National Museum is the sixth largest art museum in the world by square footage, behind the Louvre, the Met, the Vatican, and a couple others.

Walked through the Uenoonshi Park before getting to the museum.

Shinobazunoike Bentendo Temple

Oh yeah! They like baseball here.
A rubberball match between the Junks and the Lights.

Tokyo National Museum grounds with three art-filled buildings to explore

A movie and whole exhibit on screen paintings

Hattori Hanzo sword used in Kill Bill???

Each little dude is unique and precious

Jade thingy

Lara Croft donated these.

She risked her life for their recovery.

It's weird to see ancient shrines and temples in an otherwise totally modern city. I'm not sure which other cities have such contrast. Europe is old with old churches; America is new with new churches. Am I crazy? Does anyone else get this feeling? Did Japan regularly raze non-religious buildings to make way for new ones?

Nezu Shrine

I do NOT fit in this country.

Constantly decorated as if for a festival in some shopping districts.

I had sushi twice in Japan and yeah, of course it's delicious. The quality is higher, but really the difference you more easily notice is that the portions are bigger for the cost. I ate so many sea creatures. Eel, urchin, octopus, squid, crab, crawfish, shrimp, and all the fishes! The sushi is ALMOST all nigiri. Watching the pro sushi chefs work their magic right in front of you was a show in its own. The wasabi doesn't taste that different from our imitation stuff, and I think it is less spicy honestly. Strangely the one restaurant played a Japanese version of "Tale as Old as Time" from The Beauty and the Beast which I recognized instantly since I watched the movie on the flight here.

Conveyor belt sushi chain

On my last full day in Tokyo, my main objective was to explore the Imperial Palace grounds. I didn't learn until getting there that most of it is completely closed off to the public, except on very special occasions. But there was still some cool stuff in the area.

I stepped into the Yushukan war museum to see this plane but didn't go any further.

Yasukuni Shrine

A kendo meet, I assume. Everybody stared at me, the only white guy there.

A small glance at the Imperial Palace Gardens

Heeeere fishy fishy fishy fishy.

This is as close as I could get to the Imperial Palace, at the famous "double bridges", Seimonishi and Nijubashi.

I next walked to the National Theatre, which was a dud, but going there took me by its neighbor, the Supreme Court. Its architecture caught my attention so much I did a full loop around the building.

If this isn't the definition of brutalism, I don't know what is

Standard stadium food fare.

I tried to time this whole day so that I could watch the Tokyo Yakult Swallows take on the Hanshin Tigers by getting to the stadium two hours early for when I heard the tickets go on sale. No luck. I got there in time to see the crowd dissipate around the ticket vendors and SOLD OUT signs get put up. Including in Kyoto for their Orix Buffaloes in the neighboring city of Osaka, I tried three times to see a baseball game. Never any luck. The Japanese truly love baseball and snag up all the tickets unless you know the tricks, which I certainly do not. Even outside the stadium, the atmosphere was raucous. And here I bought my final personal souvenir abroad, a baseball signed by Tetsuto Yamada, the Swallows star player. Excited to add that one to my baseball collection!

Cute mascot.

Instead I watched some of a city league game.

Without a professional baseball game to watch in the evening, I explored the city on foot and took in one final Tokyo shrine, Meiji Jingu. This one is big and famous, but after seeing so many others, it wasn't all that special to me. Except for the walk through Yoyogi Park and the gardens up to the shrine, which was something out of a fantasy storybook.

Biggest entrance way I've ever seen!

These are all Pokemon Go players. Not sure what they were catching here. The game is still supremely popular in Japan.

Tokyo Government Building by day

...and by night.

I had one last box to check before taking the high speed train to Kyoto, and this feat occurs at 2:30 in the morning. I really wanted to see Tsukiji, the largest seafood wholesale market in the world and home of a tuna auction. The outer market is open to the public through the morning and has dozens of vendors and restaurants. The inner market though is open only to licensed wholesale merchants except for a mere 120 tourist visitors a day. The inner market exploded in popularity in the past decade or so, causing Tsukiji initially to ban visitors entirely for disrupting operations but eventually compromised on the 120 number, supervised closely by officials.

These motor-carts stop for no one.

To be part of the 120, first-come first-served, reviews said you need to arrive roughly two hours in advance of the 0530 tuna auctions. The tuna auction is the highlight of the inner market, but you also get to see the unglamourous fish prep operations in action. I got to Tsukiji at 0310 to be roughly the 60th person given a neon pennie to mark my being a tourist. The 120 slots filled up at 0340. We were held in a small room with no seating for the two hours. One tuna evaluator, Kosei, came in to break up the boredom and teach us all about tuna and his job. Bluefin tuna is the most valuable and yellowtail is the cheapest, with bigeye and albacore as intermediate. The evaluators prize a bright red color and a moderate amount of fat. Meat closest to the head is most expensive when reselling the fish to restaurants. The difference in price between fresh and frozen tuna is negligible. And the most expensive single tuna ever sold at Tsukiji went for ~150 million JP￥ ($1.8 million).

So much tuna!

Evaluators figuring out how much they want to bid on each fish.

A close look at what evaluators poke around in

After the auction, which tourists are only permitted to watch for about fifteen minutes, I went to the outer market to grab breakfast. The whole market smelled like whitefish from Dave's Deli. It was wonderful. If I lived in Tokyo, I wouldn't want to buy my seafood from anywhere else.

Can you smell it?!

Meibutsu-kaisen don: a smorgasbord of the freshest fish. I treasured it all except for the octopus. The octopus was hard to stomach. Too chewy.

After breakfast, I returned back to my hostel for another couple hours of sleep before checking out. I used the hostel's foot bath, a Japanese classic, to heal my feet up a bit right before leaving. Then I caught my Shinkansen high speed train, the fourth fastest train in the world, to Kyoto out of the Tokyo terminal. I tried to get a picture of Mt. Fuji on the way, but Japan's iconic mountain remained elusive. On this train, and my return train to Haneda airport, the mountain was entirely shrouded in clouds.

Kabuki-za, the main theatre for kabuki

Happy birthday to me! So close to celebrating being finished documenting my trip. My Kyoto post, my last post for all my time abroad, will be up by Monday. I'm very pleased with how much I've been able to recall in all of my posts, even when they come more than a month after I was in the location in some cases. It sometimes felt like a chore keeping this blog (who said I don't have a job?) but I'll be happy to look back on this documentation years from now. Can my 29th year on Earth be as memorable as my 28th?

Can you people get any weirder?