mindstalk | Entries tagged with japantrip1

I have nearly 1000 photos, many from a few select areas, like Harajuku troupes, museums, or the zoo. Here's a gallery of about 50 selected pictures.
http://mindstalk.net/Japan2008Select

and here's a gallery of thumbnails only of almost everything, that you can pan through.
http://mindstalk.net/Japan2008Thumbs/

( Read more... )

What to do on my last full day in Japan? What was left to do in Tokyo? Tons, frankly. I opted for trying to get to the ocean, Tokyo being a seaside town, technically. This was something of a failure -- I did see expanses of water, but never a view that said "oh hai! I'm looking at the Pacific from the opposite side" (from California, which isn't even true since I'd have been facing south or southeast, most likely) -- but I had fun anyway.

( Odaiba )

The thrilling saga of my trip to Japan continues! For those who care, this entry is about 2008 Aug 24. I gave that date in Japanese order, which is similar to programmer ordering -- it's easier to sort files with dates in them if the most significant digits come first. European is reverse, 24 Aug 2008. American, Aug 24, 2008, is screwball.

( Harajuku and Kabukicho )

I'm back. It's 10am Wednesday Tokyo time. I was not able to sleep on the flight. The trip went as well as could be expected: no delays, customs was a breeze (though we had to go through security again, despite not having left a secured area). Planes were crowded, as was the shuttle bus, and I got loud headphones and roaming knees from the undergrad next to me. I hate sitting next to young males. I miss the parts of Japan where there's, like, a train to the airport (common in the US in real cities) and where no one talks on their cell on the train, because they're not supposed to, they use text or e-mail instead (not common in the US.) So things went well but I feel subject to various stressors, including the ear-piercing whine of the Bloomington Shuttle's luggage door being open.

Thanks lyceum and hanashoujo, for various travel things.

My real laptop feels clumsily large after two weeks on the eee. OTOH it's nice to be able to see entire webpages again and have a standalone page down key, though I'm still getting used to that.

Final Japan logging will come later, like tomorrow.

Sleep is good. I need more sleep. Lots more sleep.
I decided to go back to Ueno Park, this time for the Tokyo National Museum and lots of Asian art. I was running late, so for brunch got a bento box in the train station. That had a nice variety: rice, tamago, baked tofu, a couple of small roots or tubers, a bit of fried chicken, a couple bits of either other meat or really attractive fungus, a rather less attractive black mushroom, some sushi rolls.

Outside the museum I heard some public performance. Not quite sure what, though it sounded more European in music, and possibly Italian in voice. As I approached, I encountered... an odor. The whole audience was male, and scruffy; I'm thinking this was For the Homeless. Either free art/cultural uplift, or some church thing, depending on what was actually going on.

( bonsai houses )

I hadn't had sushi since Tuesday! I fixed that, back to Sushizanmai for bintoro don, plus tamago and salmon on the side. No jelly dessert, though. Then off to Ueno Park, which I've had my eye on for a while. There's tons to do there -- at least three different museums, though I don't need to go to Japan to see Western art (then again, I live in Bloomington, maybe I do) but I'd found THE ZOO. So I went there.

( Death by 1000 LJ cuts )

Human rights of visitors to the US: declining.

Scissors being absent, just scraping at my beard with a razor seemed to do a decent job of trimming the hairs.

(ETA: I was out of small bills and big coins and decided to change a 10,000 yen bill in the nearby bank. This involved filling out a form with my name and local number. To change a not that big amount of Japanese cash into smaller bills of Japanese cash, which I'd already done without paperwork in a couple of stores, as receiving change. This seems odd.)

It occurred to me that I've had tons of sushi and ramen, udon and soba, some terikaki and sukiyaki, but no tempura here. Today I fixed that (twice), first having brunch at an udon place with shrimp tempura, no miso, and yasai (so she said; vegetables.) I'll skip ahead and say I later had it again, for dinner in the hotel restaurant; both times there was only one piece of shrimp, with the other tempura pieces being vegetables. Or for brunch, a fish of some sort, tailfin included. Brunch had tempura over rice, udon on the side; dinner had tempura in broth with soba, leading to disintegration. Lunch had iced green tea; dinner had my choice of hot or iced green tea, I took iced, and the tea *looked* exactly like water, but had a strong tea kick. I don't know how that works.

( Palace )

Principal witch-hunts gay students, lifts girl's shirt, is defended by community for defending their Christian values. Ah, northern Florida.

I forgot to mention. Tuesday, the family friend took me to a sushi place, with illustrated menus in both languages, single-piece servings, a wide variety, and him paying. So I decided to be bold and try things like sea urchin, herring roe, long-necked clam, arc shell (like the Shell oil company logo, supposedly), and a couple of identified fish nigiri that I was initially given in place of my sea urchin, because someone messed up in the ordering process.

Conclusion: I was closest to liking the arc shell. Clam was chewy, herring roe (a solid yellow mass, not like salmon (big red balls) or the other one (tiny red balls)) was weird and salty, urching was yellow, pasty (as in like paste) and salty/sea-ey, fishes were okay. Nothing to challenge the hegemony of salmon, tuna in all varieties, eel (I had eel and sea eel, didn't notice a big difference), egg, and yellowtail.

But friend and I got to totally mutually geek out with each other about omega-3 fats, mercury (he says selenium neutralizes methylmercury, and hey, there's a lot in seaweed), Okinawans, and other food/health/aging/exercise issues. It was very gratifying; usually I get "please don't read the ingredients to us, Damien, we don't want to know".

( Wednesday )

Depending on restaurants, or now hotel, I've drunk a lot of green tea, 5-10 cups a day sometimes. Clearly I like the good stuff, unlike my mother who thought it was all boiled water (which, to be fair, a rather faint tea brew isn't much different from.) Clearly I need a better way of making it at home, where I have 1 or 2 at most.

Internet continues to be for crap, with "can't access server", "network unreachable", or LJ and webcomics not loading all their CSS and image files.

Met Ai as she picked up keys for her new apartment, so I got to see what an actual Tokyo apartment is like. *eek* Along the way we stopped by a supermarket, and I got market sushi. Fairly good, for $6. And a pretty complete set of nigiri: salmon, tuna, roe, egg, eel, others, probably like 60 cents a piece.

Then back to Ichigaya, finishing my sushi (but not eating on the train itself, wasn't sure if that'd be rude), to meet the family friend, who founded Ishi Press, then Kiseido. We played Go twice, 9 stone handicap for my 10 kyu (at last stable rank) vs. his 6 dan (amateur, when he last played regularly). I lost around 50-30 the first game, got advice I knew but wasn't applying on cutting and connecting, and not trying to be too clever on certain opening stuff, and lost the second game by a point, much stronger play. And we talked a lot, about each other and my parents, esp. my mother, but that's all for my private journal.

Later dinner at Yoshinoya. No tea dispenser. No water dispenser for that matter. I did get tea by asking for it.

So, to make up for two dull entries, I'll throw in some random stuff.
* train ride from the airport: passed through rural areas, bleak buildings, interspersed with neon blue roofs. Maybe I mentioned that already, but still stays with me.
* no fat people. Biggest I've seen is kind of chubby and stout.
* the sea of black hair gets to me after a while. I haven't seen any exotic dyes, just some girls with dimly reddish hair, like Youko in taika form. *drawings* of people, like ads on the subway, those may be blonde or bright green.
* Japan seems a strong argument against "government doesn't work". Apart from the navigation insanity, the city seems well designed -- beautiful subway system, lots of maps and signage to deal with navigation (but not, you know, actually giving names and predictable numbers to every street and building), signs giving distances to things as in "foobar, 80 meters".

* oh yeah, fashion. I haven't noticed anything special with the guys, and I don't think that's just my being insensitive to male appearance. Well, I have noticed a few older men in traditional dress. But some of the girls... I don't think I've seen full blown elaborate gothic lolitas, but I've seen lots of heels, often shiny, lots of knee-high or thigh-high socks, what strike me as odd combinations such as mundane short shorts and thigh-high socks in the heat. And streetwalker girl -- right, I should go edit Sunday's entry.

* gripe GORRAM INTERNET CAN'T CONNECT TO SERVER GARBAGE ARRGH

Links: Chinese steampunk RPG thread

Today was not very exciting. After finding out the hotel's laundry setup (coin-op in the back alley) and changing more traveler's checks at a bank with limited language skills, I went to Tokyo Station and downtown. Downtown was, well, downtown. Lots of tall buildings and people in suits. Not much of anything but such things, in fact, so even less interesting than where I'm staying. Hard to get cheap food I wanted, too; some restaurants in basements, a supermarket where I saw my first bento box here, but unappetizing. I hit the palace, which was closed on Mondays, and ended up walking through some huge park. It was hot and sunny again, and the park just had small spaced out trees nowhere near the walkways, so I was defenseless. Went around the south edge of the palace grounds, took photos of what I could, fled into the subway right before reaching the Diet. Went to Ginza, the a big shopping area, having eaten not much besides a Godiva bar and a banana. Finally found an udon place and had a nice sukiyaki meal. The tea was strong, he said it was a variety of bancha, lower quality stuff.

There's actually some shopping I should do, if I can figure out how. Bento box (the actual box), lacquered chopsticks like my family had and I foolishly left with the house, and various kinds of green tea. I'm not sure where, though.

A family friend had said to meet the next day at the Nihon Ki-in, the Japanese Go Association, a name I'd heard a lot as a child. So I went to Ichigaya, and found the place. That took a while; it turned out to be really close, but the maps made it look further, until I asked someone and followed him back there. "Sumimasen, Nihon ki-in wa doko des ka?" After that, home, and vegging out on the Internet.

It was cool! 73 F! And cloudy! So I wore my black shirt with polka dot collar, the one you had me get for nice occasions, Shiver, that I've never had occasion to wear. I took the JR Yamamote, which circles central Tokyo, to Yoyogi, The JR is elevated, so you get more of a view than the subway gives, though I didn't notice anything very special. Oh, but before all that I had breakfast at Sushizanmai again, our standard platter, plus broiled o-toro, plus Joh-anago, high quality sea eel. Which seemed the same as their normal eel, only 3x as much of it. Their normal eel is different than the eel we usually get in the US: longer, and with a much lower sauce to eel ratio.

( elves, cosplayers, Roppongi )

Bonus tangent: steampunk culture, starting out with adoption by some African-Americans.

but greasy. Japan may have one of the healthiest cuisines on the planet but I just found an exception. I went walking up Edo-dori looking for late night food places. McDonald's... save for last resort. MOS Burger... didn't want to talk that far to the only one I've seen. Yoshinoya... closing. Some other places... not even sure what was on the menu. Oh hey, a ramen place. Shoutout to mlc: this one used hiragana. Also something I'd heard but forgotten about: a machine where you buy tickets to present to the cook, to minimize that horrible horrible human interaction. I, of course, broke the system, not knowing about it.

So what'd I get? Some okay cooked-from-frozen gyoza, and some ramen with a couple thin slices of pork, a hard boiled egg, and very greasy miso. Is that a hair in my soup? No, it's just the light absorbed by the edge of a couple of fat globules. It occurred to me I haven't actually had much green vegetables, apart from a few small plates of sunomono, and especially after this meal I'm ready to eat a head of lettuce, raw.

But the supermarket I've seen is far away. But 7-11 had trays of pickled cabbage. So I got one and my body feels a bit better. I also got a bottle of tea. I have black tea less often than I try alcohol, so I'm not even sure what it tastes like, but I think this tea is green. Just really strong green tea, probably not from your high quality leaves. The soba shop earlier was so much better.

Channeling Cordelia Chase in "Welcome to the Hellmouth".

So I emerged from the subway station, having meant to keep track of which way was east but having forgotten after going to the bathroom. East being the way the train was going, north being where I wanted to go. I emerged into a surface world with no landmarks and not enough visible sun. So I decided to try asking the natives.

"Yasukuni-dori doko des ka?" (Where is Yasukuni-dori?, probably missing an o or e particle.)
Answers apparently ranged from "I have no idea" to, after looking at my map, "I don't know and that's so far." A woman with limited but serviceable English did the famed "walk around with you trying to get better help" thing, asking other people who either didn't know or had vague directions. Asking for compass directions didn't work much better, though I realize that she did know landmarks which in fact pointed north for me; I doubted her for a while given my judgement of the light.

( The gory details: )

Oho! The desk person my first night here had said they were out of rooms with Internet, but I later noticed a cat5e jack in my room (with protective cover). Did I have wired Internet? I didn't ask. I did just buy a cat6 cable, and voila. Net access with A/C, not out in an alley, and subject to the hostel wireless disappearing, as it did just now while I was talking with a Slovenian girl. Downside, of course, is that I can now hide out in my room, without the opportunities of meeting gaijin from being outside a hostel in an alley.

( typing at 30 wpm adds up to a lot of text )

* it's hot and humid (no surprise.) Hasn't kept me from walking around a fair bit, I just sweat a lot.
* walking for three hours is more fun when you're in a dense city full of thing than in say bloomington.
* ramen shops are harder to find than expected
* broiled toro is really good
* there are many bicycles. They're more advanced than ours in two simple ways: the kickstand is a square u of metal that falls under the back wheel, so there's full support, unlike our leaning kickstands. And they have built in locks, no u-lock or cable stuff.
* the world of 12k fandom is small. aiwritingfic: "oh, I know someone translating that." me: "Eugene Woodbury, canis_m..." her: "yeah, canis! hey, don't nag her!"
* wi-fi is hard to find here; I think all the natives use data via cell phone. I, uh, scavenge. Right now I'm in a back alley.
* I have chosen to believe people about the low crime rate. I haven't felt like I need to rethink that.
* onigiri isn't very interesting. Well, the conveience store pieces I had weren't.
* there's a lot of gaijin in this back alley, I think that building must be a hostel. Khaosan Tokyo ninja -- oh, they're my current source. heh.
* I really wish I knew more of the language and kanji.
* my hotel has a space age bathroom. The airport did not. The airport did have baby seats in the stalls for parking your baby. Like the bicycles, a "duh!" advance.
* Engrish starts in customs. "REGULATIONS WILL BE REINFORCED". My rental cell phone's manual has it too. You'd think these people could pay $40 to get a native Englisher to proof.
* Ubuntu on the eee is decent but has quirks, especially in power management.
* I found shinto temples, and I think a buddhist cemetery.