Summer Vacation- TOKYO - day four

On tuesday I decided to go to Senso-ji temple. Its probably the major temple in the inner Tokyo area. It was founded in the seventh century for a tiny gold statue that some fishermen caught in a net. I got off at the nearest railway station, though I didn't know it, I would have to walk a half an hour to the temple. Along the way I ogled the American groceries in an import food store. I was helped by a man waiting for the crosswalk, as I looked very confused with my map open, searching in vain for a street sign. He asked "May i help you?". Even in Tokyo the people are so polite. I made it to the temple. There were lots of people around. Some Nepalese guy who conveniently lost his friends tried to make me his temple-seeing buddy. i conveniently lost him in the crowd.
There is a long, long market in front of the temple. Its got people selling everything. People are selling religious items, souvenirs, food, clothes, green tea ice cream, freshly grilled rice crackers, postcards, and random crap. I bought some postcards for my postcard collection and some green tea ice cream to cope with the ridiculous heat. i passed on the random crap though. The temple was very nice. Nothign really out of the ordinary as far as Japanese temples go, except for it being a temple in the middle of a crazy metropolis. As you looked at the pagoda there were the tops of rides from nearby fun park in your view. There was a little Japanese garden with a koi stream out back. There were tiny little shrines mixed in the garden. Shrines to what?, I have no idea.
After seeing most of the temple I wandered around some nearby streets that were supposed to be reminiscent of "old tokyo". There were some traditional sorts of shops, but by some sheer luck there was a real part of old tokyo. Three young (still in the sumo schooling process) sumos were out walking around. Two were dressed in traditional yukatas and have the traditional sumo hairstyle. The third one was a little too cool for school and was just wearing modern clothes. Since, of course, it would be unfeasible to see a sumo wrestler for more than 30 seconds and not see them eating, they stopped and bought ice cream. They walked along eating there ice cream and adding it to their not-yet-admirable girth. The too cool for school one dropped his one the ground. because of the unspoken 30 second eating rule, they all went back to the ice cream stand and got him another one. He needed all the fattening up opportunities he could muster.
After Senso-ji, I headed back to the elusive kite museum. This time I had all the free time I needed and a knowledge of where this place actually was. The kite museum was actually one of my favorite things that I saw in Tokyo. It was very small- just a floor in a narrow building. It was perhaps twice the size of my apartment. In it though, were a bazillion kites. There were all kinds of kites. There were small kites, big kites, old kites, traditional kites, kites shaped like birds, insects, squids, ships, and painted like all sorts of things. The things painted on the kites could have been actual paintings. They were very elaborate and beautiful. I think that it is mostly one guy, or a very small kite association that is mostly organized by one guy, who collects all of these kites. I really love it when people pick something obscure, like kites, to be ridiculously passionate about. I thought it was awesome that that guy devoted himself to kites for whatever reason. Its so pointless and romantic. The kites were awesome though. The place was packed with them. On the way out the lady gave me an origami jumping frog.
I finished off the day at Rikugi-en garden. I figured I should pepper my trip with some visits to green, quiet spaces, so as not to get too overwhelmed by city. Rikugi-en is, what my guidebook calls, a classical Edo-period stroll garden. i don't know precisely what it means, but the garden was originally from the 1690s-1700s. Not a lot of the original garden survives, but enough did. Its still a big garden by today's standards. There was lots of tightly trimmed grass with fenced off paths. In the middle was a big lake with some islands in it. Most exciting was a little stone bridge with clustering turtles. When you walked over the bridge, the turtles in the water beneath came swimming over to the spot underneath where you were. I guess people must feed them. Either that or those turtles really like the look of tourists gawking back at them

Summer Vacation- TOKYO - day three

For the past few days I had been sort of marveling at the ease of traveling alone... how unstressful this trip to Tokyo had been and how my expectations of it being a completely overwhelming city were not the case. Since I am traveling by myself, there are no real time restraints. I only need to wake up in time for breakfast and be back at the hostel before curfew. I don't have to worry about meeting someone at a specific time, or take into account someone else's tourist schedule. I go where i want, when I want to. When I get tired, i take a break an relax- have a cup of coffee somewhere. When i get hungry, I stop and eat. Best of all, no compromising what things I want to see. Also, i think, when you are traveling with someone else you worry even more about getting lost. By myself, I can just wander around without any particular aim in mind. Eventually I will find my way back to the train station, museum, etc.
Also, Tokyo seems relatively empty. Not really empty, since its Tokyo, but there aren't hoards of people battling there way, politely, through each other to get where they are going. Its O-ban now, a special Japanese holiday. Its one of the three major holidays in Japan. It lasts roughly a week, and its when most people go back to the homes of their parents and honor the dead in the their family. usually it involves cleaning the graves of your family members, leaving an offering or two, and then inviting the ghost back to your family home where you have a big dinner waiting for them and you. Basically, many people that live in Tokyo have left the city to celebrate in whatever place they came from. The crowds now are just light crowds. I am not smashed like a sardine on the train.
Long story, short I was feeling really at ease touristing Tokyo. I even help clueless Americans buy their tickets in the train stations. So far no problems finding places. The gazillion train and subway lines hadn't been a problem. Everything: smooth. That was until today of course. Perhaps it had something to do with adding another person to the mix. Perhaps it was karma. I was supposed to meet Wade at Ueno at noon. I finish breakfast at 8:30 so I figured I had a little time to do something before I met up with him. I decided to go to Nihombashi to find the English language bookstore and then go to the Kite museum when it opened at 11. I found the bookstore no problem. I browsed in there for a while and then left 20 minutes to eleven so that I would be at the kite museum exactly when it opened. It seemed nearby. I started walking in the direction i thought it was. But for some reason i couldn't get my bearings with the map. Nothing looked kite-like. I even hopped on the subway to get to a closer station. I just wandered and wandered. It kept getting later and later. It got so late that I wouldn't even have to time to go inside when I found it, since I had to meet Wade. However, I was annoyed at the Kite museum's elusiveness. I had even found a map on the street that said it was just across the road. But i could not see the sign- I could not see one single kite. I kept looking though because I wanted to know where it was in case i decided to give the museum another chance. Finally, I found a tiny wrought iron sign, no bigger than a sheet of paper, that was conveniently the same color as the building it was attached to. It said kite museum. Feeling slightly victorious, but mostly cheated I ran to get back to the train station. i was already running a little late to meet Wade. i got a bit lost trying to find the train station too. I got to practice some japanese though and asked a Tokyo stock exchange minion on the street. I arrived at the Ueno station only ten minutes late. Wade told me to meet him in front of the hard rock cafe. I ran out what was called the central exit. All I saw though was the zoo and an art museum. Down the road a piece was a lot of lights and buildings, so I figured the hard rock cafe must be down there. i walked and walked, but didn't see it. I asked someone in Japanese, they said they didn't know. wade said that I couldn't miss it, so I figured it had to be within sight of one of the exits from the train station. I decided to just start walking around the station until I saw it. I ended up walking for 45 minutes. I was really frustrated. i figured Wade probably left since I was almost an hour late. Finally I went back inside the station to ask at the information desk. The woman said it was just straight across the way. And there it was. Not to be missed. But INSIDE the train station. The whole time I had been outside the train station. I couldn't believe it. the whole time I kept thinking- what a stupid place for a hard rock cafe. Unbelievably, Wade was still there waiting. he said he kept telling himself that he would leave after a half hour, then after 45 minutes, then after an hour. The crazy Tokyo fashion was amusing him as he waited though. lucky for me, he waited.
We went down this shopping alley with all sort of little shops. We ate kebabs and pineapple on a stick. We looked at funny t-shirts with bad English one them. We passed old men selling eels and fruit. After shopping around for a bit, we walked to Akihabara- the place with all the electronics. It was a bit if a walk, but we made ti there all the same. We went to Yodabashi camera- a 10 floor electronics store. I was starting to feel really tired from the day. My feet were also hurting from these new shoes I had bought. So we sat upstairs in the food court until I felt well enough to go on.
Then we went to an arcade. Wade and I played a car racing game. Then we decided to go downstairs and get our pictures taken in one of the photo booths. The photo booth had all these crazy graphics in the pictures. They were going to be so awesome. However, when it was all over, we couldn't find where the pictures printed. there was no slot anywhere. We looked around the room an nothing. We decided to give it a shot at another machine. We went into one promising looking one with pens that helped you select things. We thought we were picking the backgrounds to the photos we were going to take. We started going crazy with silly backgrounds and putting pineapples and octopi on our pictures. We had been doing this for a while when we realized that all the sample pictures were of the same girls, and they weren't the ridiculously primped Japanese girls that are usually in the demos. Then Wade said "wait, there isn't a camera in here. shit, lets get out of here fast". We ran out of the booth and the girls that were in the "sample" pictures were standing right there. We bolted past them and down the stairs and out of there as fast as we could. Turns out, the photo booth we were in had a two step process. You take the photos on one side and electronically decorate them on the other. We had stumbled into the second part and had putting all sorts of goofy crap all over these girls pictures and essentially ruining them. Luckily we were out of there before there was hell to pay.
I walked back to Ueno with Wade. We said our goodbyes and then I went back to the hostel for a nap. It was dark when I got up. I went to Ikebukaro- the part with the huge department stores. I wanted to find another English language bookstore there, but couldn't so i just wandered around. Then I went to Shinjuku and wandered there too. I saw some skyscrapers and then dragged myself back to the hostel to the sento.

Summer Vacation- TOKYO - day two

I woke up, had some breakfast (complete with salad), and set off into the world. To the very heart of Tokyo to be exact. I spent the afternoon in the area surrounding the Imperial palace. The first stop was Yasukuni-jinja. Its a shrine to the Japanese legions sacrificed in wars since 1869. It is the most controversial shrine in Japan. It was a huge symbol during the nationalist push that preceded WWII. Kamikaze pilots, war criminals, and ordinary Japanese soldiers all have a home here. Aside from a collection of ikebana arrangements and the largest shrine gate I have ever seen, there wasn't anything remarkable about the shrine except for its history.
I walked past a watchtower left over from Edo castle. This led me into the big park called Kitanomaru-koen. There were lots of trees and park-like things. there was also the judo hall left over from the last olympics. I wandered through the park, and though I had no intention of going there, I found myself at the Imperial palace grounds. They let you in the grounds but the actual palace is completely out of sight from pretty much everywhere in Tokyo. There were big walls and a deep deep moat. After a bit of that i headed over to my main destination. The National Museum of Modern Art. Its a smallish museum with four floors. There were some western artists represented there, but mostly it was japanese early modern art. A big part of it might have been western art anyways. I kept walking around thinking, this must be a Matisse, this must be a Pisarro. But it would be some Japanese name I had never heard of. The copying of style was pretty much exact. I wonder if the french artist and the japanese artists were somehow all working together in the same vein or if the Japanese painters just took the french as a direct influence. There were some cool, more traditional style japanese art there, like some long hand scrolls. There were also some pretty awesome print series.
The museum people had me wear a big sticker with a camera on it, like a badge so i could run around and take pictures. I guess they wanted to make sure I had been adequately schooled in the acceptable methods of museum photography. There were also some pretty cool Julian Opie video pieces about Japan. They were based from very traditional Japanese scenes, like the ones you would see in ukiyo-e prints. But they still had elements of modern life in them. There was one of a lake and a bridge, but it was a modern bridge with traffic going over it. You could hear the noise of the cars going by. There was another one of city lights being reflected in water. I think these were my favorite part of the museum.
After the museum I went to Harajuku, because it was sunday and thats when all the crazily dressed kids come to the train station to hang out and look at each other. Unfortunately it was raining. Perhaps it was the rain, or maybe because it was a holiday, but it was a disappointing turnout for kids dressed weird. I did see a few and i tried to take some pictures. There was an alley crammed with shops. It was also crammed with people. Down this street was a shop for every kind of cute, useless thing. It was packed with teenagers buying jewelry and cheap clothes and trinkets. I did some shopping myself. After battling the crowds and the rain for a while, i was tired so I went into a coffee shop to sit around and drink something hot. I was in there for a while and when i came out, someone had stolen my umbrella. I was pissed, because it was still raining... also it was my first experience with Japanese crime (mostly relegated to umbrellas and bicycles). But I guess umbrella stealing is not so bad on the grand scale of things. I discovered the street I thought I was supposed to be on. It was a large tree lined street full of designer shops... fendi, dior, ralph lauren, harry winston.... It was nice to just look in the window. More importantly though, I found some galleries along this street. There was one for a popular japanese artist who paints spunky little cartoon girls. i bought some postcards there. I also found whitespace Tokyo and another little gallery that had some interesting photos of x-rayed bird skeletons. It was nice to see these galleries, and also going to the museum. I feel since I have been to japan, that part of me has been put on the back burner. I didn't realize until I got to Tokyo how much I missed it. I forgot how important it was to me. Since I stopped working at the Portland art museum and since i graduated from school, its just not a world I have much exposure to anymore.
I finished the night off with a trip to Shibuya, where Hatchiko, the famous dog statues is swarmed with people outside the train station. There were lots of people on the street and lots of lights. More excitingly though, I saw more crazy Japanese fashion.

Summer Vacation- TOKYO - day one

Tokyo Tokyo Tokyo. Sprawling metropolis of my imagination. Its just a two hour bus ride from Tomioka to Ikebukaro station in Tokyo. For only $20 you can go from a tiny city in the rice paddies to the biggest/ densest/ baddest city on the planet. I did just that.
I got off the bus in Ikebukaro. Ikebukaro is famous for having two of the most gigantic department stores in the country of gigantic department stores. I wandered around in the streets for a bit and was tempted to take a look inside some of these shopping meccas, but the big red backpack I was carrying (which always seemed to be in danger of whapping some poor commuter in the face) and my laptop bag made me think twice. I was already pretty tired of schlepping these bags around and I really wasn't ready to risk leaving a wake of overturned mannequin carnage behind me. I decided to head to my hostel and wait for the check in time. Then I could be rid of my stuff and merrily on my way.
I very easily got to Iidabashi station. Even i was surprised at this. Feeling a bit hungry, I found a grocery store inside the train station, bought some tea, and headed to the tables outside to eat the peanut butter pod sandwiches I had brought with me. I don't know if fate decided to be cruel to me just then or if it was random irony. I hadn't really seen it as I left the grocery store to sit down, but right next to the tables set out for your casual lunch was a series of displays (photos and captions) on the Nagasaki atomic bombing. It was a whole wall of blown-up historical photos. The other tables were occupied by old Japanese couples. There was an old man who was looking at the photos and he kept shaking his hands in the air. I imagined it was a why, why whhyyyy gesture. I was too scared to look over and see if he was giving me dirty looks as did this. As one might might imagine I was feeling a little awkward about this situation, being from the big, bad atomic bomb dropping country and all. Also, I don't particularly enjoy looking at photos of seared flesh as I eat my peanut butter pods. I ran out the door and found a bench outside that was free of any extraordinary japanese-american tensions.

After the delicious pods, i was ready to get to the hostel. I had a map to find the hostel already drawn in my notebook, I braced myself for the final stretch. As i was in the middle of bracing, it started pouring. In Japan, in summer, it never rains a little. It rains like it will never rain again and no umbrella is going to save you. Even though the hostel looked close, there was no way I was going to tramp around in all that rain looking for it. I had to wait it out. I went back in the train station... had a snack... looked at some shops... it was still raining, so I looked at some more shops. Then as the rain died down to an acceptable level I looked in my guidebook to find a more detailed map of where it was. I read the description of the hostel and it said, located above Iidabashi station, Tokyo International hostel is.... I thought, this can't be right. My hand drawn map had me leaving the station. But sure enough, I walked through some doors and there was an elevator with my hostel on the 18th floor. All that waiting and rain avoiding and the hostel was in the same building that i was in. On the upside, all that stalling mean that It was check-in time by the time I got there. The hostel is big- 2 floors of a skyscraper. The room i stay in has 8 people in it. one of them is a middle-aged Japanese woman. I am pretty sure she is crazy. Also she never leaves the room.
It was after afternoon by the time I got settled. I walked along what appeared to be a popular street in Iidabashi. There were some cute shops and a lot of promising restaurants. Then I went back to the train station and headed towards Akihabara. I decided to go to Akihabara because its one of those places that everyone who goes to Tokyo must go. The part of interest is called Electric Town. Its full of big, 5-story buildings selling discount electronics- computers, cameras, televisions, air conditioners, rice makers, etc etc. The streets are lined with these places. And of course they all have big neon lights and people shouting/ inviting you in on the street and television screens on the outsides of buildings. I don't have much of an interest in discount electronics. The electronics I want, ironically cost more in japan than in the U.S., where usually every other kind of electronic is super cheap in Japan. But anyways, I decided to go and see what there was to be seen. it was still kind of a rainy/ crappy day so I didn't want to try and do something I was excited about and then have it rain on my. Akihabara seemed like a good place to waste a rainy afternoon on.
I got to the station and as you come out there are girls dressed in maid costumes handing out fliers to something. They are japanese gothic, anime style maids. There was a small collection of them as I was both coming and leaving. Apparently its some sort of tradition, because you can always expect them to be there. I even saw souvenir cookies with maids on them. Basically, there were just electronics everywhere. And Pachinko parlors too. I was drawn into a 5 floor pachinko parlor by the promise of a big hundred yen shop on the top floor. There was no hundred yen store, but there were hundreds of people leaning over flashing, whirring pachinko machines, furiously smoking cigarettes. Girls in slutted-up sailor moon costumes wandered the rows of machines. Also keeping an eye on the scene was a buff guy with dyed silver hair, a leaf garland, a furry silver loin cloth and some silver fur boots. I tried in vain to snap a picture of him.
After a few hours of this amusement I headed back to Iiadabashi. I was tired and not in the mood to fuss much over food. So I went to the Japanese version of fast food. I love these little restaurants, they are pretty ingenious. The kind that I went to i set up like a bar with lots of stools all lined up. You walk in and there is a little vending machine looking thing in the corner. On the vending machines are buttons, usually with pictures, of everything on the menu. You put your money in, press the button of your choosing, and out pops a ticket. You sit down at the bar, the guy takes your ticket, and about three minutes later your food is brought to you. I had rice with sauteed meat, kimche and some seaweed ribbons. Its ridiculously efficient and also requires no Japanese language skills. Its an interesting place. The food is good, but I have pretty much only seen men eating there, always by themselves, who leave immediately after eating. It must be some kind of bachelor haven.
Full of rice, I went back to the hostel for bath time. The hostel has its own sento, or public bath. Its a lot like the onsens, except without the atmosphere and the spring water. You go up there, take a shower, wash yourself over and over. Then there is a mall pool full of hot water. I soaked in there for a tiny bit. It was nice. You could almost see all the lights from the city from the window while you sat in the tub, if the glass wasn't fogged up. There was a dinosaur of an old japanese woman in the sento as well. She was possibly less than 4 feet tall and had scraggly little beard.
The day finished with me closing the curtains around my little sleeping pod.