Our First Day in Tokyo
It’s been a very long day. I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to recount the events without an omission here or there.
I won’t even talk about the flights, suffice it to say that it took a very long time and there were a few pains in the ass along the way.
Anyway, Tokyo is absolutly unbelieveable. As far as its appearance and outward behavior, it’s often beyond perfect. Everything is fastidously clean, organized, and maintained. For instance, the subway, which carries millions of travelers every day, is immaculate and doesn’t appear any worse for wear for supporting the transit of thousands of commuters every hour. They even sweep the dirt out of the corners. But that’s such a small example! It’s difficult to describe the experience, exactly, but we’ve spent the day walking around and gradually realized that this whole place is like that. There aren’t any potholes in the road, there’s no trash, no grafitti, and there’s not that thin film of grime that makes you cringe away from most cities. When you stop to think about how many millions of people live in this city, it’s doubly amazing. Every retail area is clean enough that, if in a pinch, you could perform minor surgery on any available surface. And, as if it wasn’t strange enough to be in a city that’s totally sterile, it’s quiet, too. To carry on a conversation in public, one hardly has to speak above a whisper. But it’s not for a lack of cars or people, however. Everyone is considerate enough to keep from shouting at each other, yelling at their cellphones, or for driving a car that makes a horrible sound. For all of the thousands of cars we passed to day, the operator of each one seems to have maintained their vehicle so well that the engine noise wasn’t any louder than the day the car rolled off the lot. On top of that, nobody honks their horn. In the 24 hours that we’ve been here, I’ve heard two cars honk. Everybody is polite and courteous. However, there’s a distinct strangeness about quite a bit of this experience. I’ll expand on that in a later post as I get a better grip on how to describe it more exactly.
Like I said, it’s been a very long, and full day and I’m currently very jet-lagged. Right now, I’ll only breifly talk about what we’ve done so far. Tomorrow, I’ll have more energy to go into detail. Also, I’ll upload some pictures.
So, getting off the plane, we took a bus from Narita Airport to a hotel in Akasaka, a neighborhood in Tokyo. Scott and Marcia met us at the hotel and we walked to their apartment a few blocks away. We had a snack and then, while Bec crashed, I went with Scott and Marcia to the grocery store nearby and picked up a few essentials.
Today, we went with Scott on a trip to a district called the Ginza, which is the most staggering, impressive, expansive, and grand retail district that I’ve ever seen. We went into a little paper store, and checked out a small store that’s sort of like a gallery but more a retail outlet for the commercial works of the contemporary Japanese semi-pop artists like Nara, etc. We wandered around that area for a little longer, stopping to see an enormous, sweeping glass structured building that was designed by the fellow who designed the Kimmel Center. Then, we went to a department store called Mitsukoshi. Interesting fact: the Japanese love Christmas. Like, they *love* love it. We browsed our way through the store and expolored their food court. We bought our lunch there and took the subway back to Scott and Marcia’s apartment. We had a leisurely lunch and then Bec and I went back out with directions from Scott to visit the Mori building, one of many enormous sky scrapers in the vacinity. This one, however, has a 360 degree observation on the 52nd floor from which you can see all of Tokyo and Mt. Fuji in the distance. Imagine, if you will, that somebody took the downtown of every major metropolis on the planet and stitched them together. That’s Tokyo. An endless expanse of 6-15 story buildings with clusters of behemoth skyscrapers connected by highways cutting bright headlight paths through the city. Imagine the biggest city you can and double that. In Manhattan, you can see from one end to the other. In Tokyo, standing at the top of a skyscraper, you can’t see where it ends. It’s difficult to write about it, even, because when I try to remember looking at that view, my memory can’t even hold an image of that vastness.
When we got home, we immediately had to rush out to the ambassadors hosue. The American abassador to Japan was having his annual Christmas party at his palacial home and, since Marcia works for the embassy, we were all invited. Two neat facts: 1: The Ambassadors house is General McArthur’s post-war Tokyo mansion where the defeated Emperor visited him. 2: The American ambassador to Japan is the guy who was the president of the Texas rangers when Bush Jr. owned the team.
The party was strange and awkward. Much to our surprise, we wound up having our picture taken with the Abassador in front of his Giant American Christmas tree. We’ll be getting a print in the mail in a few days.
Afterwards, we went out to dinner at an interesting little restaurant. It had that low, in-floor seating, you pressed a button to call the waiter and ordered a-la-carte. Very tasty.
Now, I’ve got to crash. I’ll update more tomorrow.