The Sequel

On the off chance anybody is still subscribed to this blog, I'm taking off on a new, super-sized adventure.  If you care to see what I'm up to, it can be followed at www.thewaywardvoyage.blogspot.com

Tokyo.

Ok, so here's the account of Tokyo. As it is a special city, I'm going to deal with it in a special way, and instead of my usual recount of what I did, just talk about each of the main areas I spent time in, and what I did there. To begin, I'll start with what became my home base.

Akasaka

Ahh, Akasaka. I spent all of my nights here, because I found a cheap capsule hotel which, due to their setup, are an easy way to get a bed to sleep in at very short notice. All the "rooms" (and I use the term rooms loosely) are purchased for one night only, so I had to keep moving my belongings between the hotel and the Akasaka metro station lockers every day. The rooms themselves are capsules about stacked 2 high, each around 8 feet long and maybe 3 feet high. They each had a tv and radio built in, but unfortunately no power outlets or internet access (thus the lack of posts). Othere than sleeping, I also ate a lot of meals in Akasaka because I was coming and going from it so often. Meals I ate included a lunch at likely my favourite Japanese chain Sukiya, an Italian pizza/pasta place, and the famous Anna Miller's. Anna Miller's is an american-style food restaurant, probably best known for the waitresses who wear pink or orange maid outfits. It's sort of the Japanese equivelant to Hooters Restaurant.

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is probably the busiest commercial area of Japan. I went there a few times, both during the day and at night, and it is far more interesting at night. It has a lot of the central goverment buildings located around Shinjuku park, and at night it is just street after street of neon lights and crowded sidewalks - typical of a lot of places in central Tokyo it seems. On my last full day in Tokyo I decided to go play a game in Shinjuku one evening, where I'd walk around and see how many different free packages of tissue I could collect from people handing them out on the street. The final result - 19 packages. I brought a few back, but due to volume constraints with luggage, most were left behind. I also got a free big manga book, and some weird food item (I think?) that I have yet to discover the purpose of.

Shinjuku is also home to the nefarious Kabukicho district - the red light district of Tokyo. I wandered through it, and to be honest was a little disappointed. It had all the adult DVD shops and lots of bars and stip clubs and such, but nothing worse than you'd see many other places. I don't know if I just wasn't out late enough (this was around 8pm), or if I was in too central a part of the district, but it had none of the women offering bubble massages, or the vending machines selling porn and used panties... I actually found Himeji to be shadier than the Kabuki district.

Shibuya

Another of the big neon shopping districts, generally associated with trendy youth and music. The majority of the time I spent there was in the giant HMV and Tower Records buildings, searching for a Japanese CD that I was never able to find. From my time wandering around, I found it much the same as Shinjuku other than all the music stores. More hills to walk up though.

Harajuku

Harajuku is actually part of Shibuya, but it's completely different than the central core of Shibuya, and one of my favourite places in Tokyo, so it warrants an entry of its own. Harajuku is most famous right now for the Harajuku girls popularized by Gwen Stefani's dance group, which are a subculture of girls that dress up in various custumes and stand out front the entrance to the Meiji shrine. They were interesting to watch, but Harajuku was so much more than just them. I went to the shrine on Sunday, and I don't really know the religion/tradition, but there were many Japanese families all going to perform some ceremony at the shrine, with all the women and children dressed up in their traditional outfits, and the men mostly all in suits. In some cases there were long almost parade like processions of families. Just outside the shrine they have a big tree surrounded by boards where you could write your prayers/wishes and hang them up. From the shrine I went to the Yoyogi Park, which was the real highlight of the area for me. It's this huge park that is absolutely full of people, and it seemed that everywhere you looked you had a different musician playing, or subculture hanging out, or sport going on, etc. To list just a few of the groups: the Tokyo Rockabilly Club (all slicked out), acting troupes practicing, comedians performing, rock groups, pop groups, drum players, trumpet players, a crazy didgeridoo/pan flute duet going on, jugglers, cosplayers, dancers, sword-fighting practice, various martial artists, soccer playing, highschool ultimate frisbee team practice (awesome to watch!), artists, show-dog practicing, etc etc etc. It has so much diversity everywhere you looked.

Roppongi / Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills is just part of Roppongi, but it's the place I really spent all my time in, so I'm just going to talk about it. In the course of my research in various fields I'm interested in, I had come across Roppongi Hills a few times as one of the biggest and most advanced integrated development communities. It was a community designed and built all at once with the goal of having everything necessary for a person located very close. It is seperated by a largely artificial hill from the regular bustle of Tokyo, and contains a massive commercial building (the Mori Tower), apartments, an arena, park, tv studio, museum/art gallery, and a large shopping/restaurant (much of which is underground). Other than the ground floor and the observation platform (which they wanted money to visit, so I didn't see), the Mori tower was off-limits to random tourists, but just wandering around on the hill and down around the arena and park were interesting. They run tours of the entire place, but you need to register weeks in advance for them. It would have been nice to see some of the inner workings of the place, but it still gave me much to think about for my future projects and plans...

(still half of Japan left, stay tuned!)

Tokyo (the other half)

Akihabara
Akihabara Electric Town! To many of the people reading this, Akihabara needs no further introduction, but to the other few (i.e. my parents) Akihabara is the world mecca of nerd-dom, the haven of otakus, the home of all things electronic, game-related or animated. I first visited Akihabara Sunday evening, and they had the entire main street in the area, Chuo-dori, closed down to traffic, so it was packed with gamers, electronics buffs and otakus of Tokyo, the vast majority of which were under the age of 30. Akihabara has everything though - countless shops selling ipods, computers, cell phones, cameras, 8 floor towers selling just manga (and their 18+ equivelants), video game stores with multiple floors each dedicated to a single gaming system, back alley discount electronics sold out of milk crates, figurine shops, cosplayers, restaurants where the waitresses are dressed up as cat maids... yeah....
I didn't buy anything, mostly because I had no money, but it was a great place to hang out and check out all the games. I went back a few times over the next few days, and it's much more organized during the day when the streets aren't closed off, but that first chaotic evening was the best.

Kokyo (Tokyo Imperial Palace)

The only part of Kokyo open to visitors is the east gardens. When you enter, they give you a little token that you need to return when you leave. The garden itself was nice, but not up to the standards of many of the gardens from Kyoto. There are quite a few signs giving information about all the places of historical significance in the palace, which probably would have been more interesting if I had known much about Japanese history to relate them too. It was a nice relaxing walk though, and in a very central location right around Otemachi and Tokyo station, so easy to get to and from, and a good launching pad to the livelier nearby areas.

Tokyo Bay Area

My main purpose in going to the bay area was to visit Miraikan - the Japanese Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. There is no subway nearby, so I took one of the private train lines to get there, which was an experience in itself. The train winds itself between the towers of Tokyo, 4-6 stories in the air. It's a spectacular view of the city, and going by train above parts of the bay itself is amazing. Miraikan itself was only a short walk from one of the stops, and I got a ticket for both the regular exhibit and the special exhibit themed on the underground. Many of the exhibits had really interesting parts, but a lot of the hands-on stuff was targetting a younger audience. I especially found the areas on emerging technology and life science to be interesting. The emerging technologies one had an interactive drawing board where people could draw pictures alongside the AI of the computer, so that as you drew, the computer would take what you were drawing and add too it based upon what you were doing. It also had a display of a fish pond with fish swimming around on the floor, and you could add boundaries that the fish would be unable to swim through by standing in their path on the floor, or moving cushions to block off areas. The life sciences area had big sections on genetics and brain activity, both of which are areas of great interest for me for my programming, and both which ended up giving me a bunch of ideas for new project ideas. One of the big centerpieces of the museum is a giant electronic globe hanging from the ceiling. It's made up of a large number of LCD screens, and displays realtime pictures of weather patterns, ocean currents, etc all over the world.

After the museum, I decided to go for a walk along a path running along the water. There were a lot of small parks along the way, and I spent some time just watching them unloading ships coming into the bay. There was a museum of maritime science along the way, but I wasn't all the interested, so I passed it up.

Tokyo Subway

Tokyo has the world's largest transit system, and the Tokyo Subway was how I got just about everywhere during my visit. For the most part I went with the 1000 yen one day unlimited tickets, since I was moving around a lot each day. For the most part, the subway was always busy (sometimes very busy), but unfortunately I never got to experience being squeezed into a car so that you couldn't move. There is a vast underground system in Tokyo, where often subway stops would connect to underground malls or other tunnels or basement levels of department stores, so that you could easily get just about all you need to live without every going outside. Because sometimes there would be 4 or 5 subway lines connecting at one station, sometimes you'd need to walk almost a km underground just to get from one line to transfer to another. In general though, the entire system is very organized and very fast to get where you need to go.

Various Other Places
This is by no means a complete list of all the places I went. Some others of note include Ginza, where I visited the Sony Building. It has a display of all new and upcoming Sony products to look at and try out, and a full sony store at one of the upper levels. I checked out Ikebukuro, which is one of the busiest stations in Tokyo, and has a lot of shopping. On my way out to Narita Airport I spent quite awhile in the Oshiage area wandering around and candy hunting. I'm sure there are many other places I wandered through quickly, but this as good as I can come up with for a general overview!

After Oshiage I took a train on the fairly length ride to Narita, and after a few hours of waiting got on my plane back home. The Narita airport had a huge shopping area and was really organized despite its large size, which just made O'Hare in Chicago seem even more hellish. After multiple delays, rude workers and insane lines, I managed to run my way to the plane for Toronto just before it took off. It's crazy that it should take about 4 times as long to just transfer planes at a station than it took to be processed at the original station... Anyway, eventually got back to Toronto, had my luggage delayed for 45 minutes, and eventually got out. It's been an interesting trip, and obviously I have mixed feelings about how it had to end (and the finances resulting from how it had to end), but I got a lot out of it that I wanted to get out. Now it's time to find a normal job and get some debt paid off, and in another couple years maybe I'll try again, either in Japan or elsewhere (I got a lot of really good reviews about China during my time in Japan....) Still undecided as to whether to keep the blog up and still use it on a less frequent basis, or just let it sit and gather dust. Either way, thanks for reading!

-Richard

Ok folks, I'm still alive!

Going through my email, I have found multiple messages from people concerned for my well-being. I'm safe and well, and a bit tired, sitting in the Narita Airport about to fly back to Canada. The problem was that (ironically) it was nearly impossible to get a good internet connection in Tokyo. I was staying in one of those little capsule hotels (no internet), and since I didn't really want to lug my backpack and laptop all over the place, I'd put those in a metro locker during the day, so I didn't even have my computer most of the time. A few times I lugged them around long enough to find an unprotected wireless signal to send off critical emails (i.e. Please remember to send my luggage from Hiroshima today!), but there aren't really "private" places in Tokyo, and I didn't want to sit there next to an apartment stealing internet for longer than was absolutely necessary. I'll post this now, so that people know I'm alright, and I'll start on the post(s) about Tokyo, which I'll either finish while still here, or in Chicago, or back on Toronto.
-Richard

I went an entire day without getting lost!

Mostly I just stuck to buses and trains today, to get in as much of my remaining list as possible. In the morning I went to Kinkakuji Temple (the Golden Pavilion), since it's probably the most famous site in Kyoto. It was pretty, but I think it's a little overrated. The crowds were insane, and other than the temple itself, there really isn't much there. The garden is pretty bland compared to many of the others around.

I then took a bus up to the an out of the way town/district to the northwest called Arashiyama. It's kind of a neat place. It certainly has a touristy feel, but there aren't any foreign people there. I kind of get the feeling that it's one of those out of the way places that all the Kyoto locals go to to relax and get away from the big city. I checked out the Tenryuji Temple/Garden, wandered through some bamboo groves, and then took a stroll along the riverside back into central Kyoto.

By the time I got back to Kyoto Station it was starting to get dark out, but I had enough time to get in one more place. I took a bus to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which is another of the very famous Kyoto landmarks. Parts of it were hard to see because of the dark, but it did give some great views down at the city.

I was originally going to take the Shinkansen to Tokyo tomorrow around noon, but now I'm planning to take the overnight bus (which is half the price). That means I have one more day to do something here. I still need to decide what I want to do in Tokyo, which might change my plans yet again, but that's where things stand now.

Lost in (or near) Kyoto

So, it turns out that all renting a bicycle did was allow me to get lost even larger distances from where I wanted to be. I started off going to check out Katsura Rikyu garden, because everything I've read tells me it's possibly the best garden in Japan. It's a fair ways away, and after biking for nearly 2 hours I get there only to learn that it is closed (for renovations, I think?) I wanted to leave the northern places for tomorrow, so I decided to then bike to Fushimi Inari. The problem with this was that it was pretty far away, and along roads that weren't labelled on my map, and it was around noon, so the sun wasn't much help. To make a long story short, by the time I figured out where I was, I was about 15km south of Kyoto, not even on the map I had anymore. By now the sun was starting to go down, so I had a clear marker for direction again, and now that I knew around where I was, I managed to get back on track again. When I eventually got to Fushimi Inari Shrine, famous for its torii gate trail, it was totally dark out. From the pictures I'd seen, I thought it was like a couple dozen torii gates in a line somewhere, but it's actually this long trail up a mountain with over 10,000 gates. There was some special ceremony going on at the main shrine at the bottom, and as you climbed up you could hear the monks chanting below, and this lonely flute playing. In a way, doing the climb at night was a lot more peaceful. There was only you, the red toriis, and that steady pulse of music from below; the rest of the world was blocked out by the night. When I finished the climb, I sat at the little shrine at the top for awhile and enjoyed the night, then made the climb back down. Tomorrow I might just play it safe at take a bus though.


Maybe this should have clued me in that I wasn't going the right way? The buildings in the background turn out to not even be Kyoto, but one of the satellite cities around it.

Walking up the torii path at night. Certainly a memorable experience.

View of Kyoto at night from somewhere about halfway up the path.

This one is just for fun. I saw these in a convenience story and couldn't help myself. Mega Burger Potato Chips - American Taste! Big Mac flavoured potato chips, yummy.

Kyoto (Day 1)

Today I just wanted to take some time and explore the city a bit. I ended up going to the Imperial Palace Park and wandering around there for a bit. Unfortunately the actual palace part is closed to public. The park itself reminded me a bit of the Plains of Abrahama, in that it had a lot of open space and seemed to be a popular place for people to hang out or have picnics. I then walked to Ginkakuji - the silver shrine, and checked out the shine and garden there. So far I think the various gardens are my favourite part of Japan. I wandered back through Gion and walked along the river for a good stretch. I figure in total I probably walked 20-25km today, and my feet were feeling it. I don't really like taking buses, because you miss out on the feel of the city if you're just shuttling back and forth between touristy places. I think I'll take the middle ground and rent a bicycle tomorrow so I can see more without spending all day walking from one place to another. I also need to mark down all the places I want to go on the map I have. I made up a list of places I wanted to see, but I don't really know where a lot of them are, and it would be much easier if I knew all the things in one area, and do them all at once.

Nara Day 2

Relatively short post today because I'm pretty tired. It was overcast and drizzling in Nara again this morning, and I spent most of the morning just wandering around the commercial part of the city window shopping. I checked out two more museums/exhibits - one containing mostly statues, and the other of pottery, coins and scrolls from as far back as 1400 BC. The real highlight of the day was visiting the Yoshikien and Isuien gardens. Isuein Garden especially was amazing. You can't really capture the serenity of beauty with pictures, but here are some I took to give you an idea.





Once I was done in Nara, I got back on the train and headed to Kyoto. I had another very tiring walk around looking for a place to stay. Lugging my backpack and laptop around for hours is really starting to tax my body. Everywhere I tried was either full, or way to expensive for me. I managed to book a dormitory-style room at a small boarding house type place for 3 nights, but there was nowhere free for tonight. In the end, I got a different boarding house to let me sleep on the floor of the common area for the night. Not the fanciest living, but better than sleeping outside (in the rain). These boarding house places are cheap too, costing around $20 Cdn. Time to go to bed so I can get up early and plan my day in Kyoto. So much to see...

Nara-koen (Part 1)

I spent my first day in Nara-koen which is a huge park on the east side of Nara. It contains a variety of shrines, temples, gardens, museums and enough wandering deer to put Miyajima to shame. The thing that I found a little strange is that the deer aren't fenced in at all. The ones in Miyajima are stuck on an island, so they can't really interfere with the city at all, but in Nara, there's nothing stopping them from running across roads or heading into the main part of the city.

In various places around the park are vendors selling deer biscuits that you can feed to the deer. I didn't buy any, but it was amusing to watch a little kid get a bunch, and then run screaming while 20 deer stormed after him.


Once in the park I headed for the northern part, which contains a lot of the most famous places in Nara. First I passed through the Nandaimon gate, which contains two amazing demon guardian statues made out of wood.

I continued through the gate to Todai-ji Daibutsu-den (Hall of the Great Buddha). The hall/temple itself is the largest wooden building in the world.

Contained inside are a variet of Buddha statues. The one shown here is one of the smaller ones flanking the Great Buddha.

(more coming...)

Nara-koen (Part 2)

The main attraction of course was the Great Buddha himself. Over 16m tall and made of 437 tonnes of bronze and 130kg of gold, it truely is massive.

On my way out I gave in and bought a t-shirt describing part of the Kegon sutra. Next I went to Sangatsu-do/Hokke-do. It is the oldest building in the complex, dating back to somewhere around 740 AD. It contains a group of 16 different statues, made around the same time, ranging from the angry warrior statues Shukongo-jin and Kongo-rikishi, to the serene Gakko-bosatsu and the central figure of Fukukensaku-kannon-bosatsu. No pictures allowed in this building, but if you're curious, a few of the statues can be seen at http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/image/38462124 and http://www.taleofgenji.org/todaiji_hokkedo.html. Next I visited the Kasuga Taisha Shrine Botanical Garden. It supposedly displays the plants described in the poems of Man-yo-shu. It has sections devoted to showing different crops, fruit trees, field plants and of course trees and flowers. It wasn't too spectacular, but certainly an interesting walk.

I was starting to get a bit tired after all this, so I decided to check out a small museum where I could slow down for a bit. The Kasuga Shrine Treasure Hall is a shrine museum that mainly contains swords and armor from the Nara Period (646-794 AD). After this, I made my way to a group of large ponds in the south part of the park, and sat in the Ukimido Hall to relax for a bit.

This is about when it started to rain. I was feeling about done for the day anyway, so I headed out of the park. On my way home I took a quick stop at the Kofukuji Temple to take a peek at the 5-storied pagoda (notice the rain).

It was still a bit too early to return to the hotel, so I wandered down the covered shopping arcade road in Nara. I stopped at a restaurant and had a plate of some of very good spaghetti, and topped it off with an elaborate ice cream. There was an ice cream on the menu that costs around $25 CDN, and is a culinary masterpiece, but I could neither afford that, or manage to finish it, so I went with a much more conservative, but still very artistic looking one. I then made my way home for a much deserved rest. Tomorrow I'm going to explore the southern area of the city, which has a bunch of temples, and probably check out a few more gardens. Hopefully the rain has cleared up by then.