Japan Travel Log
trip picture page
Date entry anchors:
California: 2, 3
Airplane: 4
Kyoto: 5, 6
Kanazawa: 7, 8, 9, 10
Kyoto: 11, 12
Himeji/Okayama: 13
Tokyo: 14, 15, 16, 17
Osaka: 18
Coming home: 19, 20
Anchors to places we stayed:
higashiyama youth hostel, kyoto
kikunoya ryokan, kanazawa
utano youth hostel, kyoto
sky court koiwa, tokyo
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Cultural note anchors:
japanese money
japanese bathrooms (the kind you pee at)
japanese bath rooms (the kind you bathe at)
youth hostels
schoolchildren and english
hyakumangoku matsuri (festival)
kaiten sushi
japanese bakeries
book-off
wood
trains
karaoke
yoyogi youth hostel
vending machines
fooooooooood
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Hey, if you need a map as reference, http://sanosuke.thekeep.org/nihongo/images/Japan_pol96.jpg is pretty good. The only city we visited that is not on there is Himeji, which is pretty much halfway between Kyoto and Okayama (a little further out than Kobe).
June 2
We went to California. Got cheesesteaks at Philly's Best, stopped at K-mart to buy things like camera bags, batteries, CD cases, etc. Four hours after arriving in CA, we were at Palace Park, playing DDR on their 4th Mix machine. Lots of annoying little kids were around. This one woman kept getting us to set her up with easy songs to do. It was fun to play anyway. We went to the beach for a bit, got good pizza at a Chicago-style place, and went back to Oren's to bicker and play DDR.
June 3
Went to the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Torrance, where Oren and Carl bought manga and I bought very little. We also went to Fry's, where I got a camera bag and broke my flash. We stopped back at the beach so I could take pictures of it and got really good milkshakes. We got dinner at Outback in an attempt to get "very American food". Went to sleep early in preparation for an early plane flight.
June 4
I got up early and did laundry. Then we went to the LA airport. I managed to squeeze all of my stuff into one bag, which in retrospect is pretty amazing. We got on the plane at 1:30pm Monday, Pacific Daylight Time.
The flight was 12 hours long or so. I watched several movies (Antitrust, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Love Song (http://www.lovesong-movie.com), Chocolat) and ate somewhat decent food. We all managed to get to sit together in the center of the plane.
June 5
Japan is 16 hours ahead of California, so after 12 hours on the plane we landed in Kansai Int'l Airport at 5:30pm on Tuesday. Whee! We got off the plane, showed our passports a whole bunch of times to a whole bunch of people, and found the JR office, where we got our JR passes and tickets to get to Kyoto. We took the train to Kyoto; I forget how long it took, something like half an hour. From the Kyoto station we transferred to a bus, the 5, and took it to Higashiyama Sanjodori, and found the Higashiyama youth hostel a block down. By this point it was like 8 or 9pm. Might I mention that Japan doesn't bother with daylight savings, so it tended to get dark around 7:30pm, and get light around 5:30am. Anyway, so it was dark when we got there. We brought our stuff inside, checked in, chatted with some guys on the second floor who were from Ohio, I went and took a bath, talked with some women on the third floor, and went to sleep.
Some random notes on Japanese stuff that I need to make clear at this point:
JAPANESE MONEY
1 dollar was worth about Y120, or 120 yen, during our trip. So if I say Y100, that means a hundred yen, which is slightly less than a dollar. But you can pretty much decide that it is, for the sake of value thinking. A Y500 lunch is like a 5 dollar lunch for all intents and purposes. Japanese have coins for Y1, Y5, Y10, Y50, Y100, and Y500. Paper money starts at Y1,000. We only handled Y1,000, Y5,000 and Y10,000 bills.
JAPANESE BATHROOMS (the kind you pee at)
Japanese has several words to describe bathrooms. You might have seen the word "benjo" in an old Japanese book - it means "convenient place", and we did see some signs for bathrooms like that. Usually the signs and the people would say "(o)tearai" (pronounced tay-ah-rye, which means "wash your hands", but really these places would more often have toilets and less often have places to wash your hands well.
They have both "eastern style" (squat toilets) and "western style" (seat toilets) toilets in Japan. The bigger the city and the more foreigners there are, the more western style toilets they will have (so Tokyo had a ton; most other places did not). Everywhere we stayed had both kinds, except the hotels which had small single bathrooms with western toilets. Eastern style toilets are basically holes in the floor with lpumbing, basically about two feet long and 6 inches wide, with a hood on one end. I never did figure out how to use them, and was too scared of peeing on my shoes to usually use them. Guys sort of luck out because the men's rooms have both toilets and urinals, and even if they didn't have urinals I'm sure it's much easier to pee into a hole in the floor if you're a guy.
Japanese public bathrooms are nice and clean, but they had some downsides, besides the eastern toilets, they often would not have toilet paper (This is okay, though, because people hand out little packages of tissue paper in the streets with advertisements on them). The sinks rarely had soap to wash your hands with and there was rarely anything to dry your hands with. By the end of our trip I had a bathroom ranking scale...
*****: Western toilet, toilet paper, hook for a purse/camera/backpack, soap to wash your hands with, and paper towels to dry your hands with
****: Western toilet, toilet paper, and some of the other stuff
***: Western toilet, toilet paper, none of the other stuff
**: A Western toilet was there, but was one out of many eastern toilets. Maybe a map would exist to help find the western toilet. No toilet paper or anything else.
*.5: (Usually encountered in restaurants) No western toilet, but the eastern toilet was on a step up from the floor so you could sort of use it western-style
*: No western toilets.
You may hear me every now and then go "...and I was really happy to find a 5-star bathroom at ____," so now you'll know what I mean.
JAPANESE BATH ROOMS (The kind you bathe at)
Otherwise known as "(o)furo", a typical Japanese bath is nothing like an American bath, and is quite an experience.
The bath room is single-sex, so a place will usually have two bath rooms, one for men and one for women, or it will have some system to denote who is in there at the time. (At the ryokan in Kanazawa, there was one bath room, and a sign outside; if nobody was in there the door would be open and the sign would hang on the door; when you entered, if it was empty, you turned the sign to denote your gender and hung it outside the door, and closed the door. People of your gender could enter but know they wouldn't be alone, and people of the opposite gender just had to wait.)
The bath room, which is intended for bathing only, does not have toilets, sinks, etc. What it has is a big tub, usually big enough for 2-3 people to sit in at once, even more at certain places, and a bunch of shower water sprayers. The tub is kept full of really REALLY REALLY REALLY *REALLY* hot water. Around the outside of the room are drains, and some mirrors, and a bunch of the shower sprayers, and tons of buckets. What people seemed to typically do was use the buckets to sit on, though I think sometimes you fill them with water and dump them over your head as well. At any rate, you are supposed to wash yourself entirely using the shower thingies, and clean yourself of any shampoo, soap, etc. AFTER you are entirely clean, you get into the tub. You see, you share your bath water with the people who have used the tub for the past few days, so everyone must be clean when they go in. You don't bring soap, etc in the tub - you just sit there in the really freaking hot water and think about things like "Gosh, I am so relaxed" and "Wow, my skin is turning purple" and "It doesn't hurt if I don't move...". Afterwards, you get out of the tub and wash yourself off again (well, you don't have to, but you should. I mean, you've been in other people's bath water for however long). I would usually do shampoo before the tub, and conditioner afterwards.
This gets more interesting when there are a whole bunch of people in the bath room at once. You don't bring any clothes into the baths; you undress in an outer room. I think the worst was at Yoyogi, where there were like 20-25 of us in the bathing room at once. Fortunately there were also enough spaces along the wall for people to bathe, but since there were like 8 people in the tub when I was finished washing, I decided to forego it because it was weird enough to be bathing with 20 other naked women in the first place. Because of the mirrors, you also become pretty aware that there are tons of naked people in the room. It's weird. At least they were all strangers to me. I'm not sure how I'd deal with bathing with a bunch of my friends every day.
YOUTH HOSTELS
I don't know what most of you people are imagining, but most youth hostels are pretty much like dorms. All of them serve breakfast, which is sometimes optional. Some serve dinner, which is always optional. You have to supply your own sheets at some, or they will rent them to you, or sometimes you are lucky and they're free. At any rate, usually you share a room with several other people of your gender, and hang out in the building, and stuff. Whee. They're cheap, but not significantly cheap enough that it might be better to go find business hotels or ryokans if you're staying in Japan for a while. They're also laden with signs of "don't leave your valuables here if you go take a bath, please leave them at the desk or rent a locker". I guess foreigners aren't as honest as Japanese people.
HIGASHIYAMA YOUTH HOSTEL, KYOTO
This youth hostel is very cool because of its location. You can actually walk there from the Kyoto JR station, although you wouldn't want to while carrying all your stuff, since it is at least a mile. The thing is, if you walk down Sanjodori towards town, a few blocks later you end up in Kawaramachi, which is a big cool shopping district that contains Teramachi (I think that's what it was called), a big covered shopping street neighborhood. If you walk a few blocks the other way, you end up in a big temple&shrine sightseeing district, too. So it is way convenient to stay at. They have 5 or 6 beds per room, laundry machines on the third floor, men and women's baths, small lockers you can pay 100 yen per day to rent, and an internet computer (that was broken at the time). The breakfast was required and not too bad, with salad and toast and yogurt and stuff. The staff had one guy who was okay at speaking English; the rest of them did not, though. Their curfew was like 9:30pm and you had to be out by 9am, but oh well.
June 6
It was raining, because um, well, we didn't quite miss tsuyu (Japan's rainy season). Here's a lesson for you: In Japan, everyone carries umbrellas. Ponchos and raincoats exist, but they don't seem to be used much. After a shrine or two I got really sick of being really wet in my raincoat, and also had all of the stuff in my backpack wet, so I bought an umbrella. It also made it easier to take pictures. It made me much happier. We wandered around the Higashiyama district seeing temples for a while and stopped for food at a random place where there was a lady saying "irasshaimase!" to us. I got katsu curry for lunch. I'll talk more about food later. We wandered around more places, one of which was Sanjusangendo, a temple which has been standing since 1266 or so. We then took a bus to Nijodori, where the Nijo castle is, but it was 4pm so the gates were closed. Since it was raining anyway, we walked to Teramachi, and looked at some shops and stuff. We found an arcade and we got to play DDR 5th mix and Oren got to watch people play this new Gundam game he's interested in. It was kind of smoky though. We wandered around a while; the shops were interesting. The area was sort of like a maze. Finally we found our way out and ended up at a random restaurant on the way back towards Higashiyama. It was a grease place, so lots of fried stuff. I had yakisoba. MMMM! We went back to the youth hostel at like 7 or 8pm, exhausted, and hung out. I talked to this one girl whose name I never caught, but she is in Japan teaching English to highschool kids. She told me a lot about it, how it is sort of cool because her job mostly involves just chatting - they won't let americans teach english grammar because it'll fuck up what they've taught the students - but the thing is she only sees her students maybe 7-8 times a semester, and is really only there because the government requires a foreign language speaker to teach conversational english. But she seemed very happy. Apparently she teaches in a suburb of Nagoya where part of her role is just being a gaijin that the kids can talk to so they won't be scared to speak english.
SCHOOLCHILDREN AND ENGLISH
I don't know about some areas, but Kyoto and Tokyo seem to be pretty good on teaching english to schoolchildren, and making them unafraid of speaking to gaijin. Our first day out, we would often encounter a group of schoolchildren going somewhere, and they would wave at us and say "Hello! Hello!" and we'd be like "uh, hi." Sometimes it seemed like the guys were even being sort of rude about it, like it was a joke, like waving in our faces like "HELLO. HELLO? HELLO!!!!!!" The girl in HY YH explained to me that they're just really proud that they speak english and they love it when the foreigners reply to them, even the guys who are doing it to be "cool". At any rate, a really common thing in Kyoto seemed to be "gaijin homework". They would have a list of questions they had written up in English, like "Where do you come from?" "How long are you staying in Japan?" "What do you like best about Japan?" and they would ask and write down answers, and want to take a picture with us. They would also be way surprised when we spoke Japanese to them, as well.
June 7
We ate breakfast at Higashiyama and had to check out. So we took the bus to the Kyoto station with all our stuff and put it all in the train station lockers. Then we took a bus to Ginkakuji (the "silver temple"). This was where we had our first major schoolchildren encounter - the place was teeming with them! We spoke to a whole bunch of them. It seemed to be common to come up to americans and go "Hello, my name is ___. What is your name?" We also had a group of 'em take our picture with them, and talked to them for a while. After Ginkakuji we climbed up Daimonjiyama, which is this huge mountain outside Kyoto. Once a year they burn wood on it in the shape of the character "dai", which means large, and you can see it for miles and miles. We climbed up to the cross-piece of the "dai". There was a group of older people, like in their 50s, ahead of us on the trail. They were nice and in much better shape than us. It was weird because there were a few of them who were smoking, though. Now think about this one - you're on a mountain, so the air is thinner. You're moving a lot, so it's harder to breathe anyway. Then you smoke, so you get less oxygen? Does that make *any* sense? Oh well. So we took a whole bunch of pictures and went down. It really was breathtaking, although I acquired a nasty horsefly bite on the way. We got lunch and shaved ice nearby, stopped at a bank to cash more traveler's checks, and then went back to the JR station and hopped on a train to Kanazawa.
We found the ryokan we were staying at (Kikunoya) when we got to Kanazawa. We were originally going to take Carl out for his birthday, but we got invited to Oren's host family (the Maekawa) house for dinner instead. So we went there, and they made barbecue for dinner. It was really good. Their idea of "barbecue" involves a grill and just about anything you could put on a grill (including beef, chicken, pork, squid, other fish, vegetables, eggplant, onions, some other meat I couldn't identify, umm...) In addition to way too much grilled food, they also gave us inari (tofu sushi, which in America I hate, but in Japan I love), futomaki (maki containing lots of random stuff, also sucks in America and was good in Japan), yakisoba, some other stuff I've forgotten now, and then afterwards there was dessert. Yeek! Oren claims that when he stayed at their house for two months in the summer of '99, they would regularly do these foodfests at least once a week. Anyway, we stayed there for like 5 hours or so, hanging out, talking, watching TV, etc. It was sort of neat because the family doesn't speak much English, so we had to really use our Japanese, but also frustrating at times because Maekawa-otousan was trying to explain the prayer stuff they have in the house, and I just wasn't getting it, so Carl had to translate. We also saw baseball on TV, and we talked about how popular Ichiro is in both Japan and America. And they had Ranma 1/2 on TV, too. So it was a fun evening, and we got a ride back to the station because it was so late, and then we took a bus back to the ryokan.
KIKUNOYA RYOKAN, KANAZAWA
Sort of like a Japanese bed-and-breakfast. We only stayed in the Kikunoya Ryokan in Kanazawa, which was a shame, and I can only comment on it and speculate. Basically, it seems that there are more intensive ryokan and less intensive; ours was less intensive. The more intensive and expensive ones expect you to always wear their yukata (sort of like a bathrobe) around, and want you to be relaxed, so they bring you tea and stuff. Ours was pretty relaxed, maybe because we were foreigners. It was an old-fashioned Japanese house, with tatami rooms and sliding paper windows and closets and all. They had yukata, but we only wore them as bathrobes. I stayed in my own room, and Carl and Brad and Oren had a room down the hall. My room had enough room for a futon at night, and a small table for drinking tea at. It also had a TV. There were no locks on anything, but nothing got stolen. The only bad thing about the ryokan was that it only had one bath room, and for most of the time we stayed there I was the only female guest, so it was sort of annoying because it was always in use by the guys. One time, it turned out that Oren had just not known the sign system and he left it out, so the bath had been empty for an hour, but I had no way of knowing. Oh well. Oh, and the bath was actually too hot to get into. I couldn't even stick my entire foot in. I figure they cater to older people, and more Japanese people, who can stand the really hot baths. It was otherwise really cool; located in a good convenient place, and the staff were nice, even if the breakfasts were weird (they usually involved fish of some sort).
HYAKUMANGOKU MATSURI (festival)
We actually planned our time in Kanazawa to coincide with this, so it took up a great amount of our time. If you can read Japanese, there's a good website about it at http://100mangoku.net, and they have a translator, but it's not very good. The basic idea is that in Tensho 11 (1583), the Lord Maeda Toshiie showed up in Kanazawa, and basically the Maeda administration took over what is now the Kaga region of Ishikawa Prefecture and caused the rice production of the area to rise to a million koku of rice, which in Japanese is counted as "a hundred 10,000 koku", or hyaku-man-goku. In those days to be a daimyo you had to control the production of at least 10,000 koku of rice, so you can see how powerful and cool that made the Kaga area. Infact, I think it was even the richest province when Japan came under the control of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603. Apparently the city has been untouched by war since this period, as well. I'm not sure what exactly started the annual Hyakumangoku festivals in Showa 27 (1951), but I'd assume it had something to do with celebrating the prosperity and peace of the region in general. It's celebrated around June 14 because that's the supposed date that Lord Maeda showed up in the region. This year it went on from June 7-12 or so, with the main events going on during the weekend of the 8th-10th.
KAITEN SUSHI
This is the coolest thing in the universe if you like sushi. "Kaiten" basically means revolving. A kaiten sushi place typically has people sitting around a sushi bar in the middle, except that rather than your typical sushi bar, it's circular, and has (usually) a conveyor belt that goes around the area in the middle. Here, maybe an ascii diagram will help.
()()()()()
()+=========+()
()|| ||() <-- each () represents a stool with a person sitting
()|| sushi ||() on it who is eating yummy sushi
()|| chefs ||()
()|| ||<-- Conveyor belt
()+=========+()
()()()()()
So the sushi chefs make stuff and put it on little plates, and put the little plates on the conveyor belt. Then people can look at what's on the conveyor belt and take whatever they want. A dish will usually have two pieces of sushi, or four rolls. You can also order specific things by saying things like, "Sumimasen! Tekka-maki hitotsu onegaishimasu!" to order one plate of tekka-maki (tuna rolls), for example. What color the plate is tells you how expensive the sushi on it is. There are usually lists of how much everything is, in addition to plates going around that say "Things on this kind of plate cost 110 yen" and such. Sometimes they also have desserts or beer available on the plates. There's also free tea; they have teabags around the table and cups and spouts with hot water at every seat. When you have eaten as much as you want, you tell a staff person, and they write up how many plates you have and how much they cost, and you go pay at the register. In this fashion I managed to eat enough sushi that would cost like $30 or $40 in America for on average a mere Y1200, or around 10 bucks. You can see why this was one of my favorite things in Japan.
June 8
I woke up at 5:30am completely on my own and completely by accident (my watch said it was 7am because I'd screwed up something). So I went downstairs and took a shower (they had to turn on the hot water and were surprised I was up so early; that should have clued me in) and around the real 6:45am, Oren came into my room and when I said "...and I took a shower at 7," he said, "That's impossible, since it'll be 7am in about ten minutes." Oops. So we watched TV for an hour until breakfast. I think I watched more TV in two weeks in Japan than I had in the past year in America. Anyway, we ate breakfast and went to tour around more neat/historical stuff. We went to a crafts museum, which had a sort of cool wedding paper exhibit on the second floor, and we also went to the (Nomura?) samurai house. When the feudal system was disbanded by the Meiji restoration, the samurai lost their status, but you can still tour some of the bigger houses. It's neat, because it was lived in as recently as 130 years ago. There's a beautiful garden out back with fish in a pond and all, and a sword room, and tea rooms, and it's very nice because it was relatively uncrowded; we could just sit around and imagine what it was like to live there. Anyway, after the samurai house, we wandered over to the Rifare building (pronounced Ree-fah-ray, first misheard by me as "leaf array"), which has all of the international stuff. Carl and Oren took classes there two years ago. We snuck into the library and used their computers to check email. And after that we went to the fish market and got kaiten sushi! I was so happy. Afterwards we went to Kenrokuen, which is one of the three "Great Gardens" of Japan, and rightly so. Because of the festival, admission was free, which was also very cool. Kenrokuen is really really pretty. Imagine a place about the size of an average city park, like Schenley, except that it is extremely well-taken-care-of, and has things like big ponds full of large beautiful koi fish, and tons of plants and a lord's house or two, and so on. Then you have a great garden of Japan. Kenrokuen is probably my favorite one, actually. It has a ton of places where you can just sit or lay down and relax. I shot at least a roll of film on just Kenrokuen. Most people shoot a ton of film at Kenrokuen.
We left Kenrokuen around 5pm and went to the river where they were going to do Toro-Nagashi (I'll explain it in a sec). We were hungry, so we looked for a place to eat. After wandering around for half an hour, we came right back to the place we'd started and went to a griddle place. This is a sort of restaurant where all the patrons have access to their own griddle, and so if you order okonomiyaki or yakisoba or whatever, they give you the ingredients and you cook it yourself. Oren and Brad made okonomiyaki, which involved mixing the stuff together in a bowl and slapping it on the griddle and not letting it burn. I got yakisoba, so I just threw meat and noodles and cabbage on the griddle and cooked it. Carl got some sort of vegetable thing. I guess it was sort of neat and good. Afterwards we went back to the river and sat down and watched Tourou-Nagashi. This is where they have these little square lantern boats made out of paper with various things written/drawn on them, and they light the candles and send the little boats down the river right after sundown. It's very pretty, and a lot of people come out to watch it. They also don't really send them that far (I think they catch them at a bridge a couple hundred yards down the river). At any rate, it was pretty nifty. After that we went to Katamachi, the shopping/etc district. We went to the Taito Station, which is an arcade that had DDR 4th mix. However, it was expensive (to us at least; Y200 per person per game) because they had a big television next to the game that displayed the arrows and combos going on in the game. So we played one game of it and went back to the ryokan.
JAPANESE BAKERIES
Americans think of bakeries as places to buy cakes and sweets, and certainly there are enough of those in Japan, but they're usually "cake stores" or "coffee and cake" shops, etc. A bakery is a place where you actually will go for breakfast or lunch. They sell everything from sweets like eclairs and melon bread to breads like raisin bread, croissants, etc to real food like pizza, fish sandwiches, curry bread, hot dogs, egg&ham pastries, etc. You typically go in, get a tray and tongs, and load your tray up with whatever you want, and go to the register, where they wrap up all the stuff and you pay for it all. They are really wonderful. I had a delicious whitefish sandwich at the bakery we went to in Kanazawa, along with some weird-ass pizza with corn and peppers and stuff on it. They're also way cheap; usually items cost around 50-150 yen each.
June 9
Got up normal time, had breakfast in the ryokan. There was a Japanese guy there with two other gaijin; the Japanese guy remarked to the woman running the ryokan in Japanese that there were an awful lot of gaijin staying there, and she was like "Well, ever since we put up a home page.." anyway, we wasted time for the most part in the morning. We got food at the "Meister Cafe", which is a bakery in the eki (station. We would "go to the eki" a lot). Despite how Carl kept telling me I really had to try melon bread, I really didn't like the melon bread I got there. It was sort of dry. The rest of the food was great though. Anyway, we took our food back to the Rifare building again and watched some CNN and ate our food. After lunch we went to the street to watch the Hyakumangoku Matsuri parade. It ran from like 1pm-4pm. I shot a ton of pictures there too. They had a lot of different groups in the parade, from people doing acrobatics on ladders to people dressed up as dragons and dragon fighters, to "floats" which were really big decorated cars full of people playing tankou (these big Japanese drums), to marching bands who had all sorts of wacky instruments like marching guitars, keyboards, oboes, bassoons, glockenspiels... there were also people dressed up like feudal lords and samurai and stuff. A princess was there, and also the mayors of Kanazawa and all of their sister cities (their U.S. sister city is Buffalo, NY, incidentally). It culminated in some famous actor showing up to be Lord Maeda Toshiie. Whee.
Anyway, after the parade we went to Daiwa, a big department store, and got ice cream and I bought cheap film (Y500 for 3 rolls of 400x24), and found our way to Curry House for dinner. Curry House also rules. I should probably mention more stuff about the restaurants in Japan at some point. Anyway, after we got out, there was street dancing going on. They had this song like "hoya ne Kanazawa" that most of the dancing was to. Many groups of people were doing the street dancing, each group had its own kimono color/design that they were wearing. There was also a section of gaijin in the "ishikawa international group". There were also sections called "Tobihairi" (toe-bee-high-ree) which meant "anyone can enter". Since Carl had done some of the dances two years ago, Carl and Brad and I decided to jump in. We danced for about 5-10 minutes, or two city blocks worth of moving. The dance was fairly slow and simple (clapclap clap, right hand forward, left hand forward, wave right left right, two steps backwards while making motions like you're paddling a boat, then three steps forward, join hands, take three more steps (starting right foot), kick forward left, kick back right, then three steps forward, kick forward left, kick back right. clapclap, clap, repeat until bored). We had a lot of fun. After the dance was over all the Japanese people around us shook our hands or hugged us and told us how glad they were that we shared the street dancing with them. After we ducked out of dancing, we went back to the Taito arcade, where DDR was only Y100 per person per play, so we played like 4-5 games and took pictures by the machines. The Japanese teenagers hanging out there looked at us kind of funny, but oh well. It was a lot of fun to play a ton of DDR.
BOOK-OFF
http://www.bookoff.co.jp, this place was sort of like heaven to me. See, normally Japanese CDs cost on average Y3,000, or around 30 bucks. More, with import fees and shipping and all. Japanese music videos cost even more, and have even less on them; a typical video tape will be like 40 bucks and have only 4 or 5 videos on it. Videogames cost about the same, and I have no idea how much DVDs cost. Book-off is a gigantic used books/videos/games chain in Japan. Unlike Americans, Japanese people sell stuff back to stores in tip-top condition, so the CDs aren't scratched, the CD booklet is in perfect shape, and any extras like musician posters or trading cards or whatever came with the CDs/videos are still in the box. So CDs cost around 1250-1550 yen if they were decently good and didn't have an oversupply, sometimes 750-950 for slightly older stuff, and if they were either unpopular or the store had way too many copies, they would sell for Y250 or Y350, or sometimes even Y100. Singles were Y100 if they were large CDs and usually like Y30 if they were mini-CDs. So I came out of the Kanazawa Book-off with 8 CDs that I really wanted, and spent like Y2000. Videos cost around Y950 or Y1550 usually, although they had plenty for Y500. The Osaka Book-off we went to had an entire bookcase of cheap anime tapes. I could have bought the entire Rayearth first season for Y2500. Oh, so I haven't even mentioned the manga and PSX stuff yet. They had tons and tons and TONS of manga (japanese comic books), enough so that most aisles were clogged with Japanese teenagers reading them. Even better, most of the manga cost Y100 per book. That's like 90 cents. Do you know how much most stores charge for manga in America? Like upwards of $8 per book? Ridiculous. I bet someone could make a killing buying used manga in Japan and selling it "cheaply" in America. Oh, and they had used Playstation games at some of the Book-offs. Those weren't quite as cheap, and they weren't as overstocked and common. I did pick up a DDR append and some Beatmania fairly cheaply used, though. One Book-off even had used Playstations for Y8000, which is around 70 bucks. I forget how much I paid for my Japanese PSX on Ebay, but it was probably twice that. We went to a lot of Book-offs in Japan. They rule.
June 10
A much-reorganized day. We started off by going to the Honda museum, where we saw more samurai stuff. We got lunch at a noodle place in the basement of the Daiwa Department store. Afterwards we went to see a geisha performance, which was part of the festival. This is apparently pretty rare, since usually they perform alone and for very few people at a time. Here there were like 12 of them performing together. They played weird instruments and sang and danced, which was interesting, but it put Oren and Brad to sleep. So we left after four songs. Afterwards, we embarked on a journey to the Book-off in Nishi-Kanazawa. This was literally a journey; it took around an hour and a half or two hours to get there, I think. We took the bus to the station, took the JR line to the Nishi-Kanazawa stop, and walked for about half an hour. We got to go through the neighborhood Carl lived in when he stayed in Kanazawa two years ago, and even see the house he lived in, but we didn't try to go in or anything. There were a ton of rice fields in the area and stuff. Finally we found our way to Book-Off, the first one I saw, and I swear I was so happy. They dragged me out because we had to get going to find our way to the Maekawa house again for dinner, since it was our last day in Kanazawa. It took two buses and a subway to get there, but we were there an hour and a half later or so. On the way, we noticed there was a Book-off RIGHT next to the station. Oops. Maekawa-okaasan made a huuuuuuuuge dinner. There was sashimi and ma po tofu (Japanese style), tonkatsu, saba-fry, fried gyoza, edamame, I wish I could remember what else. At some point she asked if I'd ever had somen (a kind of thin noodle) before, and I said no, so she made a gigantic bowl of it. It has a dipping sauce, too. Endless food... and ice cream for dessert. whee. We talked for a while again, and I played guitar a little bit, and we watched a game of the soccer World Cup on TV. Whee. It was good to meet them. They are very nice.
June 11
We checked out of the ryokan and stopped to cash more traveler's checks, and then we got tickets to Kyoto and ate lunch at McDonald's while waiting for the train. We also had some food from Meister Cafe since we thought we'd be on an earlier train, but didn't take the smokingness into account. Okay, so we got on a train, and went back to Kyoto. The first thing we did was return Brad's locker key to the Higashiyama YH. Since Nansenji was close by, and we'd skipped it before, we walked there. It was neat, it had a pagoda that you could climb up if you paid Y300. So Brad and I did that, and it was really pretty and we took a whole bunch of pictures. We ran into this one woman who lookedl ike a gaijin, that is, she wasn't Japanese, but she spoke better Japanese than English. She was trying to explain about the painting on the ceiling inside the pagoda, and she seemed much less comfortable speaking English, it was sort of weird. After we came down we walked around the Nansenji area some more. There was a mountain path that everyone else wanted to walk up but I was steadfastly anti-mountainclimbing after my Daimonjiyama experience. We went up a little ways anyway to a waterfall, and then came back down. Afterwards we went into town, got our stuff from the train station, and took a bus to Utano Youth Hostel, which was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. We checked in (they spoke English pretty well). I took stuff to my room, which had a "few insects" on the table next to a candy bar, which I didn't notice at first. After putting my stuff down and starting to unpack, I discovered that the room was actually full of fruit flies. Yuck. I ran out to the front desk and was really freaked and called for someone like "sumimasen! atashi no heya ni wa, takusan mushi ga aru n da kedo..." (meaning "Excuse me! There are a ton of bugs in my room..") The guy was sort of like "Is the window open?" and was nice about it, but rather than doing anything about the bugs, he just moved me to another room. I had to shake out all of my stuff to move it without any fruit flies. Ew. Anyway, we walked awhile to a Big Boy restaurant, which really did look and feel like an American Bob's Big Boy, except the food, of course, which was very Japanese. We had things like "pasta pescatore" which involved squid, and teriyaki steak, and such. For dessert we got ice cream sundaes, which all involved a ton of gelatin. And then we went back to the youth hostel. I got to check email and stuff.
UTANO YOUTH HOSTEL, KYOTO
Have you ever seen the anime series "Koko wa Greenwood"? Utano YH looked a lot like that. The bedrooms had 8 beds to a room, with four beds per side. Not bunkbeds per se, but they were built into the walls.
+--------------0--0--0-+-0---0-0-------------+
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| \~|~~|~~~~~| | | /|\ | /~~~~~|~~|~~/ | <- pillow & sheets
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|----| |------0--0--0-|-0---0-0----| |-----|
| +--+ | | | | | | | +--+ |
| | | \ \ \| | / \ | | |
|__ +--+ / / |/ | / +--+ __|
| \~| |~~~~~~~| | /|\ | /~~~~~| |~~/ |
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^ ^
ladder curtain for privacy
You would walk into the room and there'd be a bed-wall to your left and another bed-wall to your right. In the middle of the room was a long table, and then opposite the door there was a big window that opened into a courtyard-type thing. They had guys' wings and girls' wings. I don't know about the men's bathroom, but the bathtub in the girls' side smelled like shit. I'm not exaggerating here, sadly. Other than that and the fruit flies, Utano was probly one of the nicer youth hostels we saw. It had an internet terminal in the lobby that you could use, Y100 for 15 minutes. They sold ice cream and had vending machines and stuff, and there were laundry machines, and free lockers. There was a sports room with a ping-pong table, and a meeting room with couches and floor pillows, and a piano in the cafeteria. Also, it was literally a minute from a bus stop, which was convenient in many ways. It took 35 minutes or so to get there by bus from the main station, but it only took maybe 10-15 to get to the Imperial Palace. I bought a Utano shirt, which had a kanji on it that means "to play" and can be pronounced "yuu", so it says "yuusu", which is also the way Japanese people spell/pronounce "youth". It's a neat pun. The Utano's curfew was like 10pm and you had to be out by 10am.
June 12
We started off the day by going to the Imperial Palace. You have to fill out a form and apply to take a tour there; the royal family carefully monitors who goes in and out of there. I accidentally left my passport back at the youth hostel. So we filled out most of the form. Because the bus going back to the YH also went past Kinkakuji (the "Golden Temple"), we decided that everyone else would go see that temple while I got my passport. It was no problem to go back in and out of the YH and get the passport, and the main timesuck was waiting 15 minutes for another bus to come. The plan was for me to sit near the back door, and wave at the guys if they were at the bus stop and to get off the bus if they were not. Unfortunately, the bus was full of adorable little 4-year-olds or so. They were so cute! They were looking at me shyly, so I said "konnichi-wa!" and smiled at one of the little girls, who smiled back and then turned away towards the other girl in her seat. Anyway, the kids all got off at some temple before Kinkakuji, so I got the proper seat, and managed to wave at Carl and Oren and Brad at the bus stop, and they got on, and we went to the Imperial Palace again. Unfortunately it was 12:40 at this point and the office was closed for lunch break. We walked around the park a bit, and came back and finished filling out the form, and went to get lunch at McDonald's. Here's the dumb part - both corners of the street next to the Imperial Palace grounds have McDonald's, but Carl decided we had to go to the one at the other side since it was a 3-story McDonald's. It was literally a mile away. So by the time we ran down there and got food, it was like 1:30 and we had to be at the gates at 2pm. Brad and Oren were done first so they ran back. Carl and I took the subway one stop, but overshot the park on the other side so we still had to walk a bit to get to the gate. We were very lucky, they let us in anyway. We only got to tour the outside, so it wasn't as interesting as it could have been, but it was very pretty. This is the place that the emperor lived at until the Meiji restoration in 1868 when the imperial residence got moved to Tokyo. The tourguide sort of spoke English, but it was hard to understand. We asked her a lot of questions afterwards and she was really surprised that we were just tourists, not students. Anyway, after the imperial palace tour was over we decided to go to Nijojou, the other castle in Kyoto. It was kind of cool too, I guess, but to be fair, I barely remember most of it. We talked to some schoolkids about the bus stop afterwards. One tried to get us to do their homework (he had the English questions and gave me a pen like "Here, write what you think of these questions". We were like "Dude, we read Japanese, we're not going to do your homework for you."). Oh, sometime while we were at Nijojou, Brad got sick and went back to the youth hostel to lie down. The rest of us, afterwards, took a bus to Kawaramachi, the shopping district with all the covered mall streets. We went to the Namco Tower, which wasn't anywhere near as cool as I hoped it would be. They only had DDR first mix. When we went to the covered mall streets, we played some DDR and stuff and went shopping. I bought a hat in a little store full of children looking for omiyage. Why aren't American children as cute as Japanese children? We looked for a kaiten sushi place that we'd seen before in Kawaramachi, but couldn't find it. It turned out to be closed. We got food at some random katsudon place. I got katsudon and it was really good. Afterwards we wandered some more and went back to the youth hostel. There were a bunch of obnoxious blonde girls staying there that night, so taking a bath was uncomfortable. I really never did get used to bathing with a whole bunch of strangers around. Oh well.
WOOD
Just a note, because maybe it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal for things to be standing for as long as they have. Most big buildings, like castles, shrines, houses, etc in Japan, until relatively recently, were built out of wood. So, for example, in Kanazawa we saw Ishikawa-mon, which is the big gate to where a castle used to stand. Why did we see the gate and not a castle? Because the castle burnt down so many times the locals got sick of rebuilding it. In my next day's tales, I talk about Himeji castle, which is notable because it's entirely built out of wood, is over 120 feet high, has been standing since the 14th century... you get the idea. Anyway, plenty of other places we went were either rebuilt many times, or were gone because of fire. In Tokyo, we even saw a museum dedicated to the part of town that was proud that they had their houses and neighbourhoods burn down every twenty years or so, in the "flowers of Edo" fires, as they called them because they happened so often. So. The best part about visiting big historical wooden stuff, of course, is that they are all smoke-free (obviously) :)
Carl says I should add a note about this temple in Kyoto called Kinkakuji (which as I said, I didn't see, but everyone else did). Apparently in 1950 a monk burned it down, for no apparent reason. Kinkakuji is the "golden temple", so of course they rebuilt it and put even more gold on it than before. Whee.
TRAINS
Okay, so I guess I should talk about these for a second, too. I'm sure you all have heard about the "bullet trains" in Japan, or the shinkansen. They're pretty damned fast; it took maybe 4 hours to get from Okayama to Tokyo, which is a trip of about 400 miles. There are also normal trains, which take a little longer but are still pretty good - we got from Kyoto to Kanazawa, which is about 120 miles, in two hours. The other interesting thing about the trains is that they all have tons of bathrooms, vending machines, etc. If they don't have vending machines, they have a service area, and people whose job it is to walk up and down through the aisle of the train offering food and drink and (usually) souvenirs from the area of the country you're coming from or going to. The conductors and the rest of the train staff are always really polite and they bow when they come into and out of each train car. Oh, another cool thing is that if you're sitting in the seats where there's two to a row, if you have four people, like we did, you can turn around a two-row and end up with two backwards and two forwards and sit together with your friends. (I've not seen this feature on most American trains - you usually have to be lucky to find a compartment where you they have facing seats)
KARAOKE
We got to do Karaoke in Okayama. Because at least one person asked me "how do you get up in all of these people and sing?" I thought I'd clarify that, at least as far as I can tell, you don't get up in front of strangers for Karaoke. Basically, the Karaoke places have a whole bunch of rooms, and you (and a group of friends) rent a room for some amount of time. The room we had looked like it would have been well-suited up to about 10-12 people. There's a TV screen in there, and books with tons of songs listed and their numbers, and a few microphones. You punch the numbers into the Karaoke machine to queue them, and they come up randomly out of the queue. The lyrics are displayed on the TV, and the background music plays really loudly, and you and your friends sing loudly or sing into the microphone or whatever. And yes, the Japanese lyrics are made easy to read by putting in the phonetic readings as well as kanji.
June 13
Travel, travel, travel. We got up way early, took a bus to the Kyoto station, and got tickets to go to Himeji by shinkansen. We got on the wrong train by accident (there was one that went on the same track to the same location about 5 minutes ahead of our train, but was actually a different line that our JR Passes didn't get us on for free), so we were on the train for like 15 minutes before we were able to get off at Shin-Osaka and switch to the appropriate line. That was fun. Anyway, we got to Himeji sometime in the morning, and took a bus out to the castle, and toured it. It's pretty cool. It has a long history; it was first a fort (at the top of Himeyama) in 1333, and in 1581, they built a 3-story castle there. There was a princess Sen, who was married when she was 7 years old to the castle lord's son (Toyotomi?), and then when the Tokugawas came in and killed all of the Toyotomis, they spared the castle and the princess and she married the son-in-law of the first Tokugawa shogun and was really important and so there's like this entire wing of the castle that was built for her then. Apparently you can tell from it all of this stuff about how ladies of the period lived, and it has tons of rooms for female servants and dressing rooms and stuff - they call it "Cosmetic Tower". When they built that wing, they also built the castle into a five-storied main tower with tons of defenses and stuff, like arrow and gun holes that are circles and triangles and squares, and these openings that look like windows but are really intended for dumping hot oil on anyone who scaled the castle walls, etc. Oddly enough, the castle was never actually attacked or damaged by warfare after all this - go figure. The main tower of the castle is pretty neat - you climb up six stories to a shrine at the top and can look out the windows at all of the city of Himeji. It's really nice. When we were there we met this pair of women, a mother and daughter, who were actually from Pittsburgh (the mother used to teach at Carnegie Mellon). They were really nice and were very impressed with us, that we knew Japanese and all. I would have talked to them more but Oren was really hungry and wanted to go get lunch.
So, we went and got lunch at the station, at a little noodle shop. There was this girl who was our waitress - she couldn't have been more than 13 years old. As it turned out, there was a school project by their school (Higashi J.H.S) to work at places in the area. We had seen some kids at the castle also wearing the blue uniforms helping people out with things like transporting slippers. The waitress was funny though. At one point when I was eating I heard her a couple feet behind me saying (in Japanese of course), "Look! She's using chopsticks with her left hand!" I turned around and smiled and waved my chopsticks, and after that they didn't talk about us any more. On the way out we asked about the school project. I guess it's sort of funny, I wonder how many foreigners coming through that area do speak Japanese.
Anyway, we took a train to Okayama after that. We were going there to see a garden, which we wouldn't do until the next morning, and we got to town around 5pm, so... we found a business hotel to stay in, dropped our stuff off there, and went to wander around town. We did a lot of random stuff; there was an arcade across the street from our hotel that had DDR 5th mix, and we went around the neighborhood investigating food, too. We stopped at a Karaoke place and did an hour of Karaoke. Whee! We did a few of my Japanese pop/rock songs, and a lot of anime, and Brad put in a bunch of english songs. Then we got dinner at a Curry House (mmmmm, curry) and shopped at Tower Records. I lucked out in that Tower took Visa cards, since I found a bunch of import smile.dk albums. We stopped back at the hotel for a bit and then went back to the arcade so Oren could play Gundam and we could play DDR! We played a lot of DDR. I did a lot of new songs, and actually did pretty well with them. We also did the extended version of Dynamite Rave. Whee. This was a totally camera-free evening for me - I'm not sure why I did that, but there wasn't *that* much worth taking pictures of in Okayama in the evening, to be honest.
June 14
After a nice breakfast at Mister Donut, we went to Korakuen, another great garden of Japan located in Okayama, in the morning. Unfortunately, it was sort of rainy, so it wasn't as nice as it could have been. It has four main features I remember: 1) It has a grass lawn, which is apparently historically significant because it was the first garden to feature one; 2) it had a stream where people would write half a tanka, send a cup of sake downstream, and in order to drink, someone would have to finish the tanka; 3) it had a pond that Carl nearly fell into; 4) it had a greenhouse, which was pretty cool. It also had Okayama castle, which looked big and pretty, but unfortunately we didn't go in. The original castle got bombed in WWII, so the one that's there now is rebuilt and nowhere near as exciting as Himeji castle.
We got kaiten-sushi again in the station when leaving Okayama. I accidentally left my umbrella there, too.
Anyway, the real excitement of July 14 was taking the shinkansen from Okayama to Tokyo. Damn, they're fast! We got to Tokyo around 5 or 6pm, checked in to the Sky Court Koiwa hotel, bought new umbrellas because it was raining, then took the subway to Ueno and hung out there for the evening. We went into "Club Sega" for a bit, and then wandered around this side street with stores and restaurants and arcades - Ame-something, I think Ameyoko? Whatever, it used to be the black market district of Tokyo during the wars or something. We found a kickass arcade that was teeming with Bemani games, including Para Para Paradise and DDR 5th mix. Brad and I both played PPP; he was much better at it than I was. We also played some DDR. Afterwards we wandered around the streets a bit more, looking for a tempura shop for Carl. Tokyo was actually more expensive than we were used to though, so it took a bit for us to settle on a shop. We got to sit upstairs at a counter, and all the menu stuff was in Japanese, on the wall. I got magurodon, which is probably the perfectest Japanese dish I'd ever tried. Basically, take a bowl of rice, and a whole lot of tuna sashimi, and put the latter on the former. Mmmm. Anyway, after dinner we went back to the hotel. Yay.
SKY COURT KOIWA, TOKYO
This was the best place we stayed at in Japan. It's a business hotel that gives discounts to people with youth hostel memberships. Not only was it only Y4,500 per room per night, and all singles, with their own bathrooms, but it was literally one minute walk from the Keisei Koiwa subway station. Although you couldn't actually go up on the roof, it was ten stories high and you *could* go all the way to the gate to the roof. It was really pretty to stand up there and watch the city after dark. This hotel ruled because they would let you come and go as you pleased, and would let you keep your key during the day, and had international phones there, and so on... I can't say enough about how much I liked it. The beds were comfortable, too.
YOYOGI YOUTH HOSTEL
This place sucked enough that, despite having paid for three days and not being able to get a refund, we decided to ditch it and go back to Koiwa after one night. They had single rooms, but the baths were in another building, and not available except from 5-11pm (ie, no morning showers). There was a gate closed because of construction, so it took us like 15-20 minutes to find our way there from the station, which was an unhappy experience. Furthermore, you had to put in a deposit if you wanted a key to your room, and had to leave the key there when you left the building by 9am, and could only get it back between 5-10pm in the evening. We really didn't like this restriction aspect. Apparently a lot of the other people staying there thought this place ruled because you got single rooms and they didn't *really* lock up at 10pm, as it turns out. So the habit to enjoy Yoyogi YH seems to be to go and do random stuff for the morning and afternoon, come back at 5pm and bathe, get your key, and then go out for the night. It *is* close enough to districts like Shibuya and Roppongi that you could probably walk back from clubs and stuff if you miss the last subway train back. However, since this wasn't really what we were into, the "we can't come back at midnight and then shower the next morning" thing really bugged us. The other thing - well, I'll share that in a second...
June 15
Checked out of Koiwa, moved our stuff to Shibuya, went back to Ueno. Ok. In Ueno we went to Ueno Park and found the Shitamachi museum, which is basically a museum commemorating the downtown ghetto area of Edo/Tokyo. Shitamachi literally means "undercity", or maybe "downtown", but basically, it was historically a big area where peasants and such lived. It was also where big fires tended to happen every twenty years and completely wipe out large portions of the houses and population. Anyway, it was full of old games and household items and stuff from people who lived in Shitamachi. They made models of the old houses and shops and stuff which you could go through. It was pretty neat. By the time we got out of there, it was 1:30, so we ditched seeing the other museums around Ueno and grabbed lunch at the Ueno station. We then went to the Tokyo Tower, but since it was so rainy and foggy that we couldn't see the top, we decided to go another time, and found our way to the National Instruments Tokyo office. (Brad works for National Instruments in Austin.) We met a guy there, and chatted a bit, and then the rest of us sat in the lobby while Brad was given a tour and introduced to random people in the office. It seemed like what I'd imagined a typical Japanese tech company office to look like. Afterwards we decided to find our way to Yoyogi YH. (It wasn't that late. Maybe 6pm. This was a mistake.) It was a pain in the ass to get to, and as I said, the hours seemed bizarre and annoying to us. See, we stopped off at a Book-Off for an hour on the way, and arrived around 8pm, and they told us the curfew was 10pm, we thought we needed to get dinner very quickly if we were going to manage to take a bath and be back in the building by 10. So we went looking for food in the youth hostel complex. What a mistake! There was one very expensive place that seemed to be open, and the normal cafeteria was closed. So we ended up eating dinner from vending machines. This isn't actually as scary as it sounds. I got yakisoba and curry bread, Oren and Brad got chicken thingies and various breads, Carl got fried nigiri and melon bread. The machine basically just microwaved a frozen dinner type thing, it didn't actually cook anything on the spot. I took pictures. Afterwards we called Sky Court Koiwa back and booked two more nights. Then we went to our separate sides of the dorm. I tried to go take a bath, but there were like at least 30 people in the women's bath room, it was very freaky. So I went back upstairs and heard people talking at the TV. For some reason I went and talked to them. They were nice, I guess. There was this girl Veronique from Montreal, who was in Japan to study architecture, and there was this girl Katarin, from Hamburg, who was a concert pianist in Hokkaido. I talked to them about kanji and stuff for a bit since they were watching TV and pointing out symbols on the screen. They were going to take a bath even though it was 10:30, so I went along. There were still like 20 people in there, but it wasn't too bad, I guess. The disturbing part was probably the guys hanging out outside the bath trying to hit on girls who were coming out. I looked around for an international phone so I could call Eli, but couldn't find any that took the NTT cards.
VENDING MACHINES
I guess since I'm up to Tokyo I'll stop and take a second to mention the wonderful variety of vending machines (jidouhanbaiki, pronounced jee-dough-hahn-buy-kee) that we found all over Japan. Basically, vending machines are *everywhere*. In a major city you cannot go for more than half a block without finding one, even in residential areas. There seems to be some requirement that you buy a drink and drink it at the machine, because there are only recycling bins by machines, and people look at you a little bit funny if you're walking on the street and drinking a can of something. Most of the vending machines we saw were for drinks, of the beer and non-beer variety. Some were for cigarettes. A few places had Pocky vending machines, and several had ice cream vending machines. The YH in Osaka had a Haagen-Dahs machine, even. In Tokyo we even saw CD vending machines outside a CD store. Like I mentioned, in the Yoyogi YH center, they had food and bread vending machines, too. I think the idea is that since people don't seem to steal or vandalize just for the fun of it as much, you can keep these vending machines everywhere, and don't necessarily need someone to be guarding it.
June 16
We got up and checked out of Yoyogi really early, and took the Yamanote line to Nippori and stowed our stuff there. Then we went to Akihabara. Akihabara is the coolest place in the world. I can't do it justice. Basically, it is the electronics discount center of Japan. It's not a huge neighborhood or anything, but it's fabulous. You can find some information about it at http://www.akiba.or.jp/index_e.html. We shopped at tons of geeky places. It was really cool. They have tons of computer hardware stores, cellphone stores, video game stores, used stuff stores, CD stores, etc. You can buy just about anything you'd want in Akihabara. I bought a Canon Wordtank, which is an electronic Japanese dictionary, for less than half of list price. I got a few CDs, and some anime stuff, and a bunch of PSX games, including the newest Dance Dance Revolution mix to come out, and some Beatmania stuff, and the DDR Disney's Rave game, etc. I got to try out PSX2 stuff, like the new Crazy Taxi game, and such. We went to one store called Animate, which is basically 8 floors of anime stuff. Oh, we also saw this store, "Gamers", which is an anime store that's not all that spectacular, but their claim to fame apparently is that they started an anime show just to advertise their store. Anyway, Akihabara really was like heaven. I had SUCH a great time. However, unlike what they say in Pretty Sammy Episode 2, Akihabara does not have more places to eat. We found a little katsu/fry place though and got lunch.
After Akihabara we checked back into the Sky Court Koiwa hotel, around 4pm, and took showers and changed and stuff. I put on my "hen na gaijin" t-shirt - for those that don't know, that means "strange foreigner" in Japanese. Oren kept saying he wouldn't be seen in public with me wearing it, but I didn't call attention to it, and I'm not even sure he noticed at all, and I just wore it for that evening. We went back to the Tokyo Tower, and by that point it was getting dark (remember, they don't have Daylight Savings Time), but we went all the way up to the top of the tower anyway, even though it was 7:30 and it closed at 8. We were up there so long that all the souvenir shops had closed so I couldn't buy postcards. I went up to one of the people ushering us out and asked in Japanese where I could buy postcards, and he said that they were all closed, but if I could wait until his shift was over, he would get me some. Unfortunately I misunderstood when he said his shift was over - I thought he'd said 5 minutes, not 35 minutes. So we didn't want to wait, so I apologized profusely and we left to go to Roppongi, the trendy foreigner area of Tokyo. We were going there because my mom specifically requested I get her a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt in Tokyo, and I figured I would like one too, and it would be neat to see Roppongi, so we went. We managed to find the Hard Rock Cafe without much trouble, and I went into the gift shop and picked out a shirt or two and got a little HRC Tokyo teddy bear as well. The cashier read my t-shirt and laughed, so I talked to her in Japanese for a while. She actually asked if I lived in Tokyo - said my accent was really good. I guess the foreigners in Roppongi don't generally speak so well. After the HRC, we went to Johnny Rockets, still in Roppongi, for dinner. It was really wacky - they had help-wanted ads for foreigners who spoke Japanese and English to work there. Maybe I can do that if I go to Japan! Heh. Anyway, what was wacky most was that a burger cost 900 yen (another 100 yen for cheese, and 300 yen for fries with it) and a milkshake cost 700 yen. I accidentally misestimated the amount of money I had, as did everyone else, so Oren covered the check for us and we paid him back lter. After dinner we went back to Koiwa. We tried to go on the roof that evening but found that it was impossible.
June 17
This was a Sunday. We started out the day looking for a bank so Brad could change more traveler's checks, and after wandering around Kita-Koiwa for a while, we found a post office that had an ATM that took international cards. We went into town so we could head right back out of town towards the north, about an hour north to be exact, at Mito. Mito itself is not a particularly interesting suburb of Tokyo, but what it has is Kairakuen, the third great garden of Japan. I didn't find it quite as great as the other two gardens. Admission to the garden itself was free, but you had to pay to get into Kobuntei, a teahouse in the middle of the garden that was built by Nariaki Tokugawa, the ninth lord of Mito, in 1840 or so. Since you weren't allowed to have music in the main imperial palace, apparently they used to entertain people in this house. I guess the garden was ok. We saw a shrine that had a cat sleeping in it, which was cute. There were some neat features of the garden like a bunch of neat ponds, and a spring that "spits up jewels". I guess the main drawback of Kairakuen is that the time spent between one Yamanote station, then Mito, then back to another Yamanote station, was somewhere around 8 hours. It was like 6pm by the time we got to the next place we went, which was the Book-Off in Otsuka. Since Oren and Brad wanted to go back to Akihabara but Carl and I didn't, the two of them went to Akihabara and Carl and I went to the Book-Off in Mejiro. We had scheduled to meet up at Club Sega at 9pm in Ueno, but Carl and I were there way early, so we went to the arcade in Amechaya or Ameyoko or whatever, played some DDR and Para Para, and then went to Sega to meet. We got dinner at an Indian restaurant, which took a while. I guess it was kind of funny since it was Sunday night and all. It was expensive though - if you ordered rice and nan bread to go with your meal, it cost around Y1700 total, not bothering with drinks (they had a Strawberry Lassi for Y600). It was tasty though, I guess. After dinner Carl and Oren went back to Koiwa and Brad and I went back to the arcade. Brad played a lot more Para Para, and I played some more DDR. I even played with a Japanese guy. We had both been watching the pair of guys before us play (they were about my ability level - mostly 6-footers) and so when we both stood up, I said, "isshoni?" which is Japanese for "together?" and he nodded, so we both put in coins and stuff. He played all the songs on maniac, which made 'em 9 feet, and I played songs around 5 feet. (We did Stomp to my Beat, Afronova Primeval, and Paranoia Evolution, for the DDR people who are reading this). It was a lot of fun, and I really didn't feel ashamed, infact Brad was impressed that I passed Paranoia Evolution since it was my first time ever. Anyway, we hurried back to the station and managed to catch a bus/train/etc back to Koiwa. I watched a music TV show until like 1am and copied down the names of a bunch of CDs I was sort of interested in, too.
June 18
Carl needed to do laundry in the morning so I was able to sleep in until like 9am. At 10am we got called from the front desk and had to check out, so we did that, and left our bags in Shibuya. Oren went to get lunch with a friend of his mother's who worked in Shibuya, so the rest of us wandered around Shibuya. Shibuya, for those who know nothing about Tokyo, is one of the trendy shopping districts. Supposedly the three trendiest places in Tokyo are Roppongi (the "foreigner" district, which we went to), Shinjuku, the nightclub district (also trendy shopping stuff, skyscrapers, etc), and Shibuya (like Shinjuku, except nobody above the age of 35 goes there). We went to an internet cafe, and Carl and I checked email and zephyred a little bit and such. It was actually a "cafe" insofar as that you got a free drink with your first hour of computer usage, and you had to pay Y525 for the first hour regardless of how much time you used. After that, we wandered around looking for somewhere to eat, and found a kaiten sushi place. It wasn't as good as the other places we'd been to, to be honest, but it was still neat. I asked for tekka-maki at this one and ended up with maguro temaki, which somewhat surprised me. Afterwards we stopped at a bank and I changed another traveller's check, and then we went to HMV. I was looking for Japanese band t-shirts, but all I found was american t-shirts. Sort of disappointing. After that we stopped by Baskin-Robbins, where I got this awesome blueberry pie ice cream and Carl wanted some weird ice cream with red beans and stuff in it. We went back to the station and met up with Oren. Then we left Tokyo.
We took the JR train to Osaka, and once we got there we had to swithc trains like three times and walk about 15 minutes from the station to find the International Youth Hostel we were staying at. Oren carried one of my bags for half of the walk, which was imperssive. This was a really good youth hostel except for its location. It had wonderfully good hours, like the building and desk being open from 7am-midnight, baths both in the morning and evening, etc. The hostel had a gym and a bunch of recreation and meeting rooms, including a cafeteria room with a big TV and a piano and a whole lot of books. Rooms had six bunks to a room, but there weren't many people there, so I got my own room. It also had free lockers and a very nice bath. We checked in around whatever, 8pmish, and walked to the nearest restaurant we could find, which was a "Chinese Restaurant" that mostly served normal Japanese food anyway. Then we went to a convenience store, where I bought some Pocky and a bottle of Pocari Sweat, since we'd gone the entire trip and I hadn't tried it yet. I tried it. I didn't like it much. Neither did Carl. It was pouring rain and Oren ran ahead of us to the hostel, and Brad stayed to make a phone call, so Carl and I found our way back through the rain. We found Oren in the TV room and watched a bit of SmapXSmap, a TV show featuring the pop band Smap. Then we took baths and went to sleep. I must admit the other bad thing about the youth hostel was that the beds were basically boards with blankets on them, so they were somewhat uncomfortable and I woke with a huge crick in my neck.
June 19
A VERY long day. Last day in Japan - very very sad. I woke up around 9:30am in Osaka on Tuesday, June 19. We went to the subway and took a subway train to Nanba, which is a shopping district in Osaka. (We originally booked the youth hostel thinking we had a flight around 1pm and would want to go there straight from the hostel, but it turned out our flight was at 5:30, so we screwed up.) We stashed stuff in lockers, and wandered around for a few hours. We found another Book-off! I got a video that I'd resisted buying new for Y4800 the day before, for Y950 used, so I was very happy. (It was a L'arc en Ciel concert video - I watched it a few days after coming back, and it was well worth it! I wish we'd gotten to see some concerts in Japan) We accidentally found ourselves wandering around the restaurant supply district. We didn't find any plastic food stores, but we did find sign stores and such, and I got an "O-te-arai" sign (means "Bathroom") and Brad got a takoyaki lantern (with a big cartoon octopus on it). We got okonomiyaki in a little second-floor griddle restaurant, then went back to the station to take the subway to Kansai Int'l Airport, at around I guess 3pm, after taking half an hour to find our lockers. We got on the plane at 5:30pm. Did I mention that Kansai Airport makes you pay Y2650 to go to the area with the planes, basically gouging you for daring to leave the country? I was really surprised. Good thing I'd saved some money for souvenirs at the airport (I also got a t-shirt and some more postcards there). Anyway, the plane ride was pretty uneventful. I couldn't sleep, so I watched more movies. Head over Heels, Sweet November, Love Song (again), Crouching Tiger (again), Toy Story, etc. We got off the plane at 11:45am in Los Angeles on Tuesday, June 19. We took the shuttle to Orange County, went to Philly's Best for cheesesteaks again, and came back to Oren's apartment to spend a few hours napping and eating pizza and trying out our new PSX games. That was a really long day, since I went to sleep for real around midnight, making it approximately 32 hours long for me. Wacky, huh?
June 20
Got up and went back to Pittsburgh. The end.
FOOOOOOOOOOD
I tried not to get into detail too much about food as I went along or this document would have been five times as long. So I will make a note here at the end about some of the stuff I ate and the restaurants we saw a lot of in Japan.
-- Curry: You might be thinking of curry as an indian food. Well, Japanese have their own variation on curry, where it is pretty much a thick gravy, as mild or as hot as you want it to be. If you get [something] curry, what that usually means is that you will get a plate of rice with [something] on the rice, and it will be all covered in curry gravy, and served with a spoon. This is quite delicious. My favorites were katsu curry (breaded fried pork cutlet) and shabu shabu curry (thin-sliced beef). There's a fast-food chain called Curry House in Japan which is quite good, but there are plenty of other restaurants that either specialize in curry or happen to make curry as a dish. There's also a sort of pastry called curry bread, which is sort of like... well, imagine a curry-filled doughnut. I wasn't too fond of it, but Brad really loved it.
-- Noodles: Noodle shops are probably the most common eateries in Japan. You see them everywhere, from along the road to the stations to even the train platforms in the stations. There are a bunch of main sorts of noodles that they feature. Ramen is common for the fast-food noodle places, and you can often see these places that have no seats, just counters, and businessmen stand and slurp up ramen noodles and soup. Udon is a thicker sort of noodle, which you tend to see in soups, or sometimes you could get it fried. Soba is sort of like Japanese spaghetti, it's an all-purpose buckwheat noodle that can be served hot or cold or fried. I like yakisoba, which is basically fried soba noodles with cabbage and (usually) chicken. Zaru soba is pretty good too, where they serve the soba noodles cold and give you a dipping sauce for them. Apparently in some regions like Hiroshima, they also put soba noodles in their okonomiyaki. There's also somen, which are really thin noodles that can be served similarly to soba, but since they're thinner I'm not sure if frying them works as well.
-- Ice Cream: Yeah, this isn't Japanese food exactly, but it's really common to find places that have soft ice cream, all over the place. The way you find them is that they all have these huge plastic softie cones outside them. Ice cream is way popular, and they seem to have many more varieties of flavours that I've never seen here. One place had soft ice cream mocha/caramel twist, for example, and the McDonald's has banana milkshakes (and reportedly melon, though we never saw that). Another wacky thing is that sundaes are very popular, and on the surface they look like ours (with whipped cream, etc on top). However, it seems that many/most of them have a ton of gelatin under the actual ice cream so it looks like there's more ice cream. It's not bad, it's just freaky if you don't expect it. Another way popular thing is ice cream on crepes. We went to one arcade that actually had one food stand inside, for making crepes with ice cream.
-- "Old-fashioned Japanese-style breakfast": I was warned about this in advance and it still freaked me out at the ryokan. These breakfasts would usually contain several small plates with random stuff on them. Random stuff included pieces of fried egg with various stuff inside it, random pickled things, pieces of tofu in various forms (fried, cold, etc), pieces of various kinds of fish in various states (once there was a plate with some sort of whole fish, about 4 inches long, just baked or dried or whatever, and another time a plate full of inch-long dried fish), pieces of sliced ham or cooked ham, usually with mayonnaise, and other things that we couldn't identify. The good part was that they usually included a pack of nori (dried seaweed, it's what they wrap sushi in), and a big thing of rice, so if nothing else I could eat a ton of rice and nori and that'd be my breakfast. Whee.
-- Sushi: We really only got sushi three times in our two weeks, although it really was pretty common to see some form of it, usually nigiri, in random convenience stores and train stations and all. (Fortunately, not in a vending machine). They put a lot of stuff on sushi there that you would never see here. Mostly just weird-ass fish with claws and tails and stuff sticking out.
-- Okonomiyaki: sucks in America but is quite good in Japan. You put a bunch of stuff in a bowl, like maybe some vegetables (mostly cabbage) and some meat of some sort, and then some batter, which I think is mostly made out of egg. Mix it all together and put it on a griddle until it's nice and brown sort of like an omelet but there's no cheese or typical ingredients. Then you put this sauce on top, like worcestire sauce but better, and if you're Japanese you put mayonnaise and fish skin and stuff on top as well (ewww). In some regions, as I mentioned, they also add noodles to the okonomiyaki (if you've ever seen Ranma 1/2, that's what Ukyou does).
-- McDonald's: Almost exactly like in America, except much faster. You can get almost all of the normal things you can here, with a few additions and subtractions. There's the Teriyaki McBurger, which is a patty of some not-beef meat (we think pork) with teriyaki sauce on it. There was also the Galby McBurger or something, which seemed like a trial thing. It looked like a sloppy joe sandwich. Galby is some sort of meat, we're not really sure what. There was a Chicken Tatsuta sandwich too, which Oren said was pretty much just like a normal McChicken sandwich. They didn't have any of the "grilled chicken" sandwiches and I think they were missing some of the foods McDonald's serves in America to compete with places like Burger King. (I think we saw one or two KFC's in Japan and I think one Wendy's and that was it for American fast food aside from McD's, unless you count Yoshinoya, a noodle joint in California that comes from Japan.)
-- Donburi: Stuff on rice. Tendon: Tempura on rice. Magurodon: Tuna sashimi on rice. Unagidon: Eel on rice. Oyakodon: Egg on rice. Katsudon: Breaded fried pork cutlet with egg and onion on rice. Etc.
-- Katsu: Breaded fried stuff. With yummy Japanese Worcestershire sauce. Tempura is also breaded fried stuff, but it's a different sort of breading, and with tempura you dip it in sauce rather than putting the sauce on top.
If you found this page interesting, you may want to check out Hollis's Japan Trip Page. I'll try to post a few more interesting Japan travel stories as I find 'em. Brad, who traveled with me to Japan, has his pictures up here.
Deanna Rubin
Last modified: Tue Jul 31 14:53:59 EDT 2001
