Japan: March 20 - 27
Tokyo : Monday March 20, 2006
Hi, this is Brennan. For the first time in the history of fatturtletravel.com, one of the kids is journaling!!! When we got to Japan, mom and dad decided that we needed a fresh new look at journaling. (I think it has more to do with them not wanting the work anymore.) We arrived in the Narita airport on March 20 from Beijing. Shortly after clearing immigration dad went into his usual “airport mode”; in other words he took off at about 100 mph and left the rest of us wondering where he was hurrying to. Five minutes later he came back saying that the limousine-bus left for our hotel from platform two in 10 minutes. We even had time to find an ATM. Way to go dad!
Sure enough 10 minutes later the bus came to platform 2 and whisked us and our luggage away towards our hotel. While on the bus, my mind took some time to digest what I had seen so far in Japan. The most obvious difference was the fact that we were being shown courtesy! There was no pushing or shoving, just polite and calm order. Nobody was spitting on our shoes! This was a shocking difference from the chaos of Chinese crowds, streets, airports and audiences. Furthermore we had been in Japan for half an hour and no one had pointed at us or taken our picture! The final major difference was that it was so quiet; no yelling or car horns. Because of this Sierra, mom and I fell into a deep sleep until we got to the hotel. (The five o’clock wakeup this morning and the warm sunshine probably played factors too.)
About two hours later we got into our room and settled in for a little while. We then went to a local restaurant for dinner. We got 3 bowls of meat with noodles which were very good. We also got two noodle soups, one with seaweed and the other with algae. They were somewhat less appetizing……
After our meal we went to the much awaited Ginza district. This according to dad is crammed with electronics shops of all sorts and copious amounts of neon. Unfortunately it had been taken over by the insidious fashion industry. We only found the big Sony store, the Apple store and an HMV shop. The rest was now just high end clothes stores. It was however still crammed with a kaleidoscope of neon lights. It was like daylight out, despite the fact it was 8:00 at night.
As we walked around the city, I noticed hundreds of vending machines on the streets. Usually they were filled with hot or cold drinks but sometimes they had soups, ice cream bars, cigarettes and snacks. They seemed to be really popular with the Japanese public because they were as cheap as stores and usually busy. I liked how the tray lifted up to the selected item and then gently lowered it to the bottom of the machine. So my pop wasn’t shaken from a long drop to the dispenser. I had heard about vending machines that dispensed underwear and I looked for them, but I didn’t see any. Another distinctive feature of the Japanese lifestyle was the huge amount of packaging. We bought cookies and candies in large bags that were all individually wrapped in cellophane, sometimes wrapped twice in a bag. Straws, chopsticks, napkins, toothpicks, pens, pencils, fresh fruit and more were all encased in plastic. In our hotel bathroom, there were dozens of minute toiletries available from tiny toothpaste tubes to hair bands. It was all very well organized and clean.
Before going to bed, I realized that one thing that I really liked about Japan was being able to use the tap water to brush my teeth. Except for Ireland and England, we have been using bottled water and it has been a big pain.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006: Tokyo, Japan
This was our first real day of touring in Tokyo. After getting up and walking out the door, dad expressed his feeling that we did not need breakfast today. This was met with a roar of reprisal from mom and Sierra. Dad wisely compromised and said that we would get something if we saw it but we wouldn’t go out of our way to get some. After mom agreed to that dad took us on a route that was far away from any building through Hibiya Park. It was filled with feral cats. We saw a local lady putting out cat food for them; so they were well cared for. Mom suspected that dad’s routing was a ploy for us not to get breakfast but he insisted it was the shortest way to the palace. A mere 30 minutes later we had in fact made it to the palace. Maybe dad wasn’t lying after all! We were all amazed by how different the castle walls were from others we had seen. The ancient Japanese went solely for size and not for smooth walls. They used the largest stones that they could find lying on the ground. There were lots of divots and cracks in the wall.
We also took a look at the reconstructed white palaces; as the original ones were destroyed during WWII. We couldn’t get close to them because the royal family is still there. We then toured the imperial gardens. Mom loved the flowers and trees, dad and I however, found another source of entertainment; the crazy Japanese photographers. They were taking pictures of any tree in bloom. At one cherry tree we counted 32 photographers and 29 full scale tripods! Dad had his camera out to, but he didn’t take a single picture of the flowers.
After the gardens we went to the Budokan, a famous martial arts arena. I believe that a sumo tournament was being held there that day because we saw some huge guys walking up to it. We managed to find an Am/Pm shortly after leaving it and got a truly Japanese breakfast consisting of meat between rice patties. Dad hurried us along and we started towards our most controversial stop of the day. Yasukuni shrine was built to honor the soldiers that died in WWII. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad but they also buried the commanders of the Japanese prison camps here. To make matters worse, the trees that were used to create the gate for the shrine came from old growth forests in Canada! Close to that was the Meji Shrine, which was built to honor the emperor Meji. The first things we noticed about the temple were the Votive tablets. There were thousands of them hanging on a wooden screen hung on a screen around a tree. They were written in many languages by visitors that hoped to see their wishes come true after they were blessed by the priests. The second thing we noticed was a wedding procession. At first we thought it was a funeral but then we noticed that the woman we thought was a mourner was smiling and that people in the procession were taking pictures. Except for the priests and the bride in white (which we thought was a funeral colour for the Japanese), everyone else was wearing black clothes. Oops. On our way out we just had to get a picture of the wooden sake barrels that stood by the exit. There were 180 barrels stacked 6 high next to each other. Each barrel was covered in heavy white cloth and painted with black characters and brightly coloured flowers and other designs. It was a huge display. We then caught a subway back to our hotel and ended our day.
Km walked: 28
Hrs walked: >8