Japan
part of the On the Road travelogue
 
 
Japan is simply a fantastic place to visit.  The culture is unique, ingrained, and fascinating.  The people are generally very friendly, and the food is excellent!  The spoken language is easy to pronounce (phoenetic, like Spanish), and you can sometimes get enough accomplished by just deciphering the written alphabets (there are two!).  In addition, many people know at least a little English.  The train system is truly fantastic.  Oh, and did I mention the food?
 

Yuki

During our two weeks in Japan we stayed in Yuki, a small sub-suburb of Tokyo.  Jason has a high school friend who is living there on the JET program (teaching English to students).  Derek was incredibly gracious to host us, even though his apartment is authenitically Japanese (aka small).  It's two rooms: a foyer/kitchen/dining room and a living/bedroom.  There was just enough room to roll out three futons to sleep in, with all of the furniture placed in the other room.  We put the bedding away every morning to reconvert the room into a living space.  (BTW, the only heat source is a kerosene heater for use during the day.  At night it gets chilly - I measure 45F the first night!)  We walked around Yuki quite a bit (I even went running twice!).  There are temples everywhere, and many small farms, but other than that it's pretty much a quiet rural town.  We got to meet some locals too - a couple of Derek's friends had dinner with us a few times.

I took a couple of side trips from Yuki to the towns of Nikko and Mashiko.  Nikko is basically temple-city.  There are five or six main attractions here, besides what looks like some decent hiking in the summer.  This is where I o.d.'ed on temple for the rest of the time in Japan.  I will spare you the endless soaring roof shots, but there was a nice bridge there.  Mashiko is a pottery village - there are maybe a hundred kilns, stores and galleries there, most of them along the main route.  I was partly interested because I just finished a ceramics class at the DeCordova School before my trip.  Right smack dab in the middle of town is the mother of all pottery stores - a veritable Pottery-Mart.  Marking this great landmark is an enormous 25 foot ceramic bear - go figger.  Here you can get almost anything you can imagine, though most of the stuff is generic grade.  You're better off in the small galleries for fancy stuff.

Nagano

The Olympics were cool - we saw four events: In general it was pretty crowded, but not too bad.  We commuted into Nagano Station from Yuki for each event - about 3 hours each way.  As a result we actually didn't spend load of time hanging around - just a few hours of walking around here and there.  The weather unfortunately was mostly rainy in Nagano - which meant lots of snow in the mountains.  There was one incredibly mobbed tent of official souvenirs, but other than that the merchandising was pretty low key (except for the pin-heads!).  I was actually surprised how uncommercialized it was - I'm sure it would be completely different in the States.  Of course we found a way to get online, courtesy the Kodak tent.  We even managed to crash the Canada House - very cool space where there were always tons of Canucks hanging out.  I think there was a USA House, but it was for athletes only.  Meanwhile the Russian House was right over an international beer pub.  Doesn't that say it all?

Tokyo

Tokyo is a big city, like many other cities, but there are a lot of cool places for all of those hard workers to blow off some steam.  Plenty of large video arcades, too many noisy Pachinko parlours (akin to slot machines), nightclubs, coffee shops, movie theaters, and various seedy establishments.  The Shibuya area has a particularly high concentration of all of these.  Here we got to sleep in a tube - otherwise known as a capsule hotel.  These are basically bunk-sized pods with just enough room for a bed (and a tv hanging from the ceiling).  They're mostly crash pads for those poor Japanese workers that don't make it home after partying with the boss.  They can just crawl out from their tube and zip back to their waiting jobs.

We spent a day in the city with Derek's friend Miho.  She took us around to the Sony building, where we checked out their current line up (and also hacked our way onto the net).  We also visited the Akihabara area, which is the electronics district.  I was pretty much floored with all of the cool gear they have for sale.  They seem to be about a generation or two ahead of us in everything: portable phones so small they look like toys; MD player/recorders just big enough to fit a disc (like a CD, but smaller and recordable); laptop computers half the size of those in the US.  No need to doubt where the trade deficit comes from.

We also stayed up all night in Tokyo - twice!  Once we hit a nightclub, which got swinging around 3am.  When we left at 5, we found a Denny's to hang out at until the trains started running.  The second time was the night before we left Japan - we went into the city to wait for a connecting train the next morning, and killed time walking around, hanging out in a coffee shop, then going bowling at 4am!

...next: Hong Kong

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