Japan Adventure #2

Got on the shuttle in the morning, decided to take the shuttle to the JR station instead of back to the airport. At first, I thought I had made a mistake, but turns out that you can catch the Narita Express (N’EX) here as well. Met a girl from California who didn’t discover until she got to Japan that apparently Americans need visas to get to China, and so was trying to make the best of her trip. Said she did research, but I feel that is a fairly fundamental first point of research. Anyway…together we found the platform we needed, and made it downtown.

N’EX has displays that show advertising and the upcoming station, as well as any outages on the JR and Toyko subway system. Lots of interesting ads, including several for WiMAX. While I was coming in on the N’EX, I saw several little league teams playing baseball, plus people playing tennis, basketball, soccer, etc. I also got to see some freight trains, and the thing I thought was interesting is that instead of having a lot of specialized cars, tank cars, refrigerated box cars, regular box cars, etc., most of the cars were actually flatbeds, which could take shipping containers, but also there were self-contained modules for things like liquid tanks that could be mounted to the same car, several on a single car. The only specialized cars I saw were for loose raw materials (coal, ore, and the like). I didn’t see any of the engines, so I’m not sure what they use, but thought that the modular shipping system was a neat idea.

Tokyo station is HUGE. Makes Grand Central/Penn/Union look tiny by comparison. Had to quest for an ATM so that I could get Yen, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get by on just credit cards. That took me more wandering than anything else, because the maps on the exit of the terminal were unclear, and the entire old side of the terminal (the original building) is under construction, making it hard to get where I thought the map was telling me to go. After about 45 min of wandering, I found the ATM, and headed back to the station to find a coin locker to dump my suitcase into for the day, and buy my fare to Harajuku station on the Yamanote line. Fare purchase and ATM both had an option for English, so no problems there.

Got some water and a Pocari Sweat (had heard about this from friends, it’s like Gatorade – I don’t know who Pocari is, but his sweat sure is tasty!), and headed out.

Yamanote has the same displays so finding my station was easy. Harajuku has a huge shrine to the emperor Mejii and his wife Empress Shoken, so I started by wandering back through that. It’s hidden back inside of huge trees that form a canopy over the path. There are several gates that are made of wood poles so large I wouldn’t have been able to get my arms around them.

There were many young boys and girls (3-7) as well as some women dressed in traditional garb headed back towards the shrine. I’m not sure if there was a festival, or if this is common. There was a whole display of Chrysanthemums, as well as bonsai, and a display of wine casks that were donated from different regions of France – apparently this emperor was trying to embrace the best parts of Western culture – started dressing Western (no topknot), drinking wine, etc.

From there, I headed along the edge of the park to get to the ’64 Olympic stadium. There were a bunch of street vendors hawking food, and I realized I was starving. I had what I think was an okonomi-yaki (Japanese pancake pizza), and it was fabulous. The Cirque du Soleil was in town, so I walked past their tents, and on to NHK plaza. From there, I wandered in what I believed to be the general direction of Shibuya. I am not sure I took the most direct possible route to get there, but I definitely made it there without having to double back, which is pretty amazing given my usual sense of direction. Shibuya station is home to one of the largest street crossings in Japan. Even on a Saturday, when the lights turned red, the entire intersection just filled with people. I have some great pictures, including some from the second floor of a huge Starbucks. I took a picture next to Hachiko, the dog. I had two nice folks from NHK stop me and ask if they could see the pictures that I took of Shibuya, so I let them copy my pictures (they had a little chip reader thing), and they briefly interviewed me, don’t know if it’ll end up on TV or not, but I signed a release form, the other end of which they gave to me, but is all in Japanese. Something I found interesting is that smoking while walking or “just anywhere” is frowned upon. They had designated outdoor smoking areas, and there would be people dutifully clustered around them. It’s not that people don’t smoke other places, and there’s nothing really special about the smoking areas, other than ashtrays, but they’re placed at regular intervals, and actually have a map indicating where other smoking areas are located in the general area.

I set off to wander through the alleys near the station looking at stores, etc. Lots of tiny little stores that were selling clothes, food, blaring music, people standing out front to call you into the store. There were some department stores, including one that had a 30-person choir performing an enthusiastic version of the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” complete with choreography – random! I wandered around in Shibuya until about 2, then decided to hop the train back to Tokyo station. Man next to me started talking to me, I guess to practice his English – asked where I was from, what I thought of Tokyo, President Obama, what kind of work I did, etc.

When I got off of the train, I still had some time to kill, so I wandered towards the Imperial Palace. You can’t really get to the palace itself, but there are several “outer gardens” where you can wander around. While I was walking the street at the edge of the gardens, I saw a police car and a police motorcycle. The cars are Toyotas, but I don’t remember the model, the motorcycles are Honda VFR Interceptors, in white. Other interesting carspotting today – I think I saw a Porsche 959, definitely saw a Honda (Acura) NSX, one Skyline R32, and a mid-80s Camaro IROC-Z. Motorcycles are common, but scooters, both the small-displacement (think Vespa or Honda Cub) and the larger displacement ones that can handle highway speeds (roughly equivalent to a motorcycle, just with automatic transmission and a flat place to put your feet) are far more common.

By the end of my wandering, I was pretty tired. I estimate that I walked 6+ Km, and between my bag and the fact that I don’t normally walk that much, I was pretty worn out. I took a breather at the fountains near the Imperial gardens, took some pics of the sun dropping behind the trees (not much of a sunset tonight, I’m afraid), then headed back to the station to get my bag and hop on the train. A side note, it gets dark quite early here – 5 pm it was already dusk. I noticed that it started getting light at around 5:30 AM.

Side note – according to the roaming guide on Sprint.com, I was supposed to be able to get CDMA service in Tokyo, but not Hiroshima. I turned my phone on in several locations while roaming Tokyo, including near Narita, and if there’s CDMA service in the region, my phone couldn’t find it. I have pretty much decided to go old school and dispense with a mobile for the week. The time difference makes it extremely unlikely that I will be getting or participating in phone calls for work, and I have Skype plus a webcam for calling home, so I can’t really justify the expense of renting another phone, especially since I bought a 2G GSM phone while in Stockholm this summer (it doesn’t work here).