brainstorms

Wednesday February 09, 2005

tokyo: minimalist travel notes

United Airlines, toronto->chicago->tokyo
long lines at US customs as usual. customs agent surprises me and does not ask what i would be doing in japan.

boeing 777, center row, hardly any sleep, cold, five really bad (cheap) movies, including cat woman (mind numbingly awful), taxi ("as much fun as getting a flat tire in midtown manhattan during the rush hour" -- roeper), shark tale, and couple of other moving pictures of emptiness. [look no further than just about any top 10 list of the worst movies]

brook hollow: quite possibly the worst cabarnet sauvignon ever tried: rubbing alcohol with deep red coloring?

economist 1/1/2005: special report on endangered languages, navajo elder as quoted by akira yamamoto:

if you don't breathe
there is no air
if you don't walk
there is no earth
If you don't speak
there is no world.

[i will remember this last line often.]

reading pratchett's jingo. each page has more thought and humor than any of the two movies on board.

dimmed down ibook g4 lasted nearly five hours.

narita: absolutely the cleanest airport washroom (or any other public washroom) i have ever been in. [i have been to swiss, german, dutch, british and of course canadian washrooms. no contest.]

terminal 1: past the gates, looking for a limo bus to cerulean. mysterious cash-only-yen-only signs. have to lineup for a single government money exchange operation, four people in a tight office, two-piece suits, lots of paper, stamps, mechanical calculator, dollar goes in, yen comes out.

decided to take the train: narita express to shibuya. modest train, no bullets on this line.

no gsm here or maybe different bandwidth? my cellphone useless.

smartly uniformed train personnel, white gloves. one uniformed kid with detector/scanner, looking between the cars. trying to stay awake. advance warning in english about arrival to station.

shibuya station: uniforms everywhere: men in two piece suits to students in sailor moon pleated skirts and white socks.

lots of smokers.

cerulean towers: distant unobstructed but hazy fuji-san view from 20th floor.

next morning, alternate world: decade-old dark-navy two-piece suit, silk necktie, cotton hankerchief, bostonians. pocket-full of business cards, enough yen to get around.

2300 yen for a miniature breakfast buffet. neat little omelettes [delicately built by a quiet chef with chopsticks], breakfast sausages, some coldcuts, salad(?), fruits, yogurts, berries, cereal. not enough cheese. no multigrain bread. there is a smoking section somewhere, but not too noticeable. stroong coffee.

tokyo adventure: you are in a twisting maze of little subways, all different. quite possibly the most intricate subway system there is. [my wife, reading these notes, quips: you have not been in paris metro yet.]

yes, trains are really really packed, but going the opposite direction. getting in and out is an elaborate, polite, close-contact dance.

getting on: one ticket machine with better english, easier buttons, but as it turns out, wrong line. found out [later] we have a tokyo subway ticket instead of a tokyu line ticket. paid 230 yen instead of 200. proverbial lost keys, streetlamp. exit gates flash and complain loudly.

finding starbucks: i ask for the usual grande nonfat nofoam extrahot latte, but her call more melodical, less english. done nicely.

food show in shibuya station, well named. dozens of food tables and booths, all elegant and beautiful and ready to take home, but carbs, carbs, carbs, some protein. bought some smoked salmon.

english and latin alphabet a rarity. nothing like linguistic loneliness.

large flip do-everything cellphones everywhere. More than one person carrying two.

interesting phones in booths.

SUN offices at yoga: dtlogin hopeless, sunray trying nfs across pacific, futile. tightvnc [darwinports] to lifeline (u60+s10) with an ibook is very comfortable.

dress shoes really hurt.

hard to find sugar substitutes. trying expresso without it. (cough)

product presentation to a customer.

formal, traditional business card exchange, both hands, reading, bowing.

14 hours time gap, a day ahead. tokyo morning call, talking last night. missing my son.

skip lunch. work until 7pm.

cars on the other side of the road.

amazing food and drink dispensers: hot, cold, pop, beer, tea, latte, junk food.

next day a brief chance to walk around with my camera. doing a greenspun impression: good light, good technique, pedestrian images.

one evening, all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu (like mongolian hot-pot but without the chimney) with colleagues, excellent beef but i am told australian, not kobe. i declined beeru, chose red wine instead.

later also missed sake and karaoke with colleagues.

large book/music/video/game/comix complex in shibuya. finding miyazaki, kodansha bilingual ghost in the shell, akira sketchbook and few other mangas i recognize, but i can get them in toronto. on another floor, wishing for a kodansha bilingual haiku volume i may possibly not have. Also would have liked a Juzo Itami collection, but too tired and confused to find anything without help.

english->japanese translation industry doing quite well.

early thursday morning, meiji jingu shrine, just before sunrise. a wide road through the large forest, crow calls louder than subway trains. a large crow sitting on a branch near the shrine doors. cannot get close enough for an image. it reminds me of the basho haiku, but the mood is all different.

vast courtyard (outer shrine), beautiful gates and doors (inner shrine) monks in white, cleaning, dusting.

morning sunlight catches the top of the shrine. a photographer's lucky day.

mostly very quiet, disturbed only by a crow, double clapping of a worshipper, melodious clanking of the coins thrown into the offering box, and my nikon's (sigh) shutter and winder. a team shows up, players make their offerings, and take a group picture on the shrine stairs.

A giant drum in the corner.

outside the shrine, groundkeepers sweeping, morning sun beams through the dust.

frozen fingers, two-and-a-half rolls in an hour, hard to leave now.

double back to the hotel, some breakfast, just on time for the limo bus.

a nice but long trip back to narita. I can see trees that look like enlarged bonsai. I can hardly spot any classic-looking japanese homes, but not looking very hard.

at the airport, just enough time to get my morning latte and do some gift shopping. found takara batman and batgirl two-pack for eren: some of the most articulated action figures ever. i did not get a second set for myself.

flight back shorter, but with even worse movies. sad about julie andrews. trip again made tolerable by pratchett, ibook, and a little bit of sleep.

chicago customs: huffy customs inspector - i require hand inspection of my slide film; been through too many scanners already. ibook goes back, gets out of its neoprene sleeve, gets rescanned.

back to toronto: much colder, but familiar. will have to watch lost in translation again.

[notes from a trip to tokyo, jan 2005]
[all images (except the map fragment) by ozan s. yigit, using nikon 801s, 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5D, fuji velvia 100, provia 100]

(2005-02-09 07:24:56.0) Permalink Comments [0]