TOKYO, JAPAN 3 April - 10 April 2007

We leave LAX at 2:30pm and arrive into Narita airport at 6pm...the next day. Leaving our fellow Angelenos 13 hours behind we arrive at the first stop of our travels: Tokyo, Japan.

The train ride from the airport to Tokyo takes about an hour and a half. The subway signs luckily have English text for us gaijins (foreigners). The map detailing the subway is enormous but it turns out to be very straightforward to use.

After a quiet train ride in a very clean train we arrive into Takadanobaba station. Baba, as it's called, is mostly a college student haunt. We emerge from he station into a beehive of traffic, pedestrians, lights, billboards and exhaust. Near the station exit a young man is on his knees throwing up into some bushes, his girlfriend holding his head. We cross the street and on the other side another kid is on his knees throwing up, sans girlfriend. Moving thru the crowds are small groups of college kids, each group carries a banner, it's members singing in drunken good humor. Turns out these are drinking clubs from the local college. Welcome to Japan!

We make our way to our Inn. We are staying in a traditional Ryokan where we have a small bedroom with tatami mats and sleep on futon floor mats. Calling the room small is an understatement. We stay there for 3 nights and then move into a hotel in Shiodome where we finish our stay.

Tokyo is definitely a challenge to navigate for the non-Japanese speaker. Address and street names are rare. Every restaurant menu is in Japanese, luckily most menus have photo's of all their dishes so good gaijins like us can smile and point. And the food? Fantastic! From a simple bowl of ramen to the freshest sushi, the Japanese do not mess around when it comes to the palate.

Japanese people are very polite and kind, and have always tried to help us when we’ve asked, but few of them have spoken English well enough to be able to help us (not that they should have to speak English in their own country, but as you can imagine, Japanese is not an easy language to learn). An example of the extraordinary coolness of Japanese people: today we were walking from a temple to the train and were caught in light shower. A woman was stopped in traffic, she got out of her car, ran across the road and gave us an extra umbrella. Domo arigato!

We have taken in quite a few sights during our weeklong stay. We've walked thru the gardens of the Imperial Palace, wandered thru the Tokyo Tsukiji Fish Market (the world's largest) and watched the Cos-play-zoku congregate on the Meji-jingu bridge in Harajuku. However the most interesting thing about Japan is the culture, which is totally unique to our Western ways.

For example, yesterday we visited one of the many public baths here in Tokyo, called “Sento.” In the past, most Japanese homes did not have baths, so it was the custom to bathe at the local bathhouse, and there is still a bathhouse in many neighborhoods in Tokyo. There are separate baths for men and women, and once inside you shower in a large open shower with other people, and then soak in a Jacuzzi together. One interesting feature of the sento near us was the electric pool. One area of the bath has low electric currents running thru it, supposedly to simulate swimming with electric eels.

Aside from the public bathing, Japanese people are very demure, and the result is that Tokyo is a pretty serene and quiet city despite its enourmous size. For example, we were crushed into a full subway car during morning rush hour, and no one spoke a word, plus people backed into the subway car, so as not to “deliberately” push anyone. People are also very polite about cell phone use here - they rarely use them inside shops or even walking on the street. Most amazing, we haven’t heard a single car horn, not one.


We explored the first 4 days on our own and then on Saturday met up with several alumni from Thunderbird (Dori's graduate school) at a restaurant called Gonpachi. This is the restaurant the Prime Minister took Dub'ya when he came to Tokyo...we ate there anyway. The evening was a blast, with beer and Japanese tapas flowing freely. It was great to get a local perspective on daily living in Tokyo.

The next day Rei (Dori's school friend) took us to amazing Italian restaurant for brunch, then to the Ultra sleek Mori Art museum in Roppongi to see an interesting exhibit called "The Art of Laughter." We finished our afternoon with a visit to the revered Senso-ji temple in Asakusa where we witnessed a beautiful Buddist procession. An amazing day, thanks Rei!

Today we took a day trip out of the city to Kamakura about an hour south of Tokyo. It was a great change of pace, very quaint, green and peaceful with astoundingly beautiful temples and shrines peppered throughout the area.

A whirlwind week to be sure and it feels like we barely scratched the surfce of this amazing city. Alas, time to pack and get ready for an early ride to the airport as we head to Bali. Till then, Sayanora