J³ (James, Joel, Japan)

Yesterday’s post now has photos. Also, I decided to actually proof read it.

Japan has the world’s highest proportion of vending machines, with approximately one for every fifteen people. I rarely went anywhere today without seeing at least one – most of them were drink machines, though, with the remainder being cigarette machines. Never saw any food machines, or any of the… weirder ones.

Tokyo is the world’s largest city, now containing more than one and a half times Australia’s entire population in the Greater Tokyo Urban Area. It is, legally speaking, not actually a city, but rather a special metropolitan prefecture of Japan, comprising the twenty-three special wards of Tokyo, thirty-nine municipalities to the west, and two outlying island chains.

So, the bed wasn’t too bad, though the pillow was a bit thin. Plenty long enough, though for some reason I found myself sliding down to the bottom of the cubicle as I slept. I set the alarm late so I could sleep in a bit, but I wound up waking up a bit earlier, and sat watching some TV on the set built into the cubicle. Didn’t really understand much. I don’t even remember exactly what I watched.

Got up after a bit and went to have a bath in the hotel’s bathhouse. I’d read there were showers somewhere, but I couldn’t find them – realised later they were on the sleeping floor, just off the coin laundry room (not entirely sure whether or not I’ve had used them instead of the public bath if I’d known beforehand). The bath was soooo very warm, though. Sadly, no photos – I snuck my phone in so I could take some sneaky shots if it was empty, but it never was, and I’m not sure I want photos of random naked men on my blog. Here’s one of the entryway, though.

After my bath, I had breakfast. They have a breakfast buffet here with a whole range of different things, which was included in my room price. (Actually, they have a dinner buffet too, which was also included, but I wanted to go have dinner in Ameya Yokocho instead.) Or rather, a whole range of different Japanese breakfast things, which means rice, miso soup, various pickled vegetables, and sweet breads (by which I mean breads that are sweet, not sweetbread), plus tamagoyaki and fried tofu, and even a big cooker full of oden, which I wasn’t expecting. I grabbed a tray with a bunch of tasty-looking things, but when I started eating, my stomach suddenly started protesting “hey, this isn’t breakfast food!” Managed to eat most of it, though.

After breakfast, I checked out, heading to my next hotel, the Toyoko Inn in Uguisudani (which means “valley of the Japanese bush warbler”, since it’s a valley where lots of them used to live). The Toyoko Inn is right near Uguisudani station – you can even see it from the platform. But first I walked up Ameya Yokocho in daylight for the first time. The shops open in the daytime were quite different from the shops open last night – instead of restaurants and bars interspersed by shops selling bags, now the shops open were fishmongers, butchers, even a green tea shop. I was amused to find one place where last night was a bustling and brightly lit restaurant next to a closed shop now instead sported a bustling kimono shop next to a dark restaurant. I was taking a photo of the juxtaposition when a passer-by in some kind of uniform offered to take a photo of me standing in front of the shop. I thanked him and told him I’d be ok, thanks.

Got the train from Ueno to Uguisudani (grabbing the stamp on the way through, thought I over-inked it, so it’s a bit blotty, and even worse, I put it on sideways) and headed to the Toyoko Inn. Love this poster that I saw at the station, in the image below – it’s got details on where the exits of the upcoming stations are in relation to the train, so you know which carriage is the best to get on. I also met a pair of girls dressed up nicely in kimono who graciously agreed to let me take a photo. Not entirely sure why they were dressed up – I saw a few today, but I’m not aware of any special events on.

The first trick is to cross over the railway lines, of which there are fourteen, which is quite impressive. The shinkansen lines also pass through, but at this point they’re still underground. Only four of those lines actually stop at Uguisudani Station – the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku lines heading in each direction. I couldn’t officially check into my hotel until 3pm, but I could leave my luggage there, and while I was there I took care of setting up the Toyoko Club membership I’d applied for (gets me cheaper room rates and earlier check in) and paying for the room. Grabbed a few brochures while I was there too.

I chose this particular Toyoko Inn branch because it’s near a neighbourhood of Tokyo named Yanaka (like, it’s literally on the other side of the station from my hotel), which is one of the last remaining areas with a Shitamachi feel, which is exactly the kind of ye olde Japan I enjoy, since it managed to come out of TTII largely unscathed. Shitamachi, meaning “lower city”, is where the lower classes used to live – as opposed to Yamanote (“the mountain’s hand”), the domain of the moneyed and the samurai. And yes, the JR Yamanote Line is named after this. It’s usually said that Standard Japanese is the Tokyo dialect, but to be more precise, it’s actually the Yamanote dialect, which was crisper, more polite and so forth. The Shitamachi dialect still exists today as slang, but mostly only slang used by rougher types, punks and bikers and yakuza and so forth. (For readers with any knowledge of Japanese, when people end words with –ee instead of –ai, that’s the Shitamachi dialect.)

During my planning for this trip, I happened to discover the Yanaka Shichifukujin Meguri, a pilgrimage to seven temples, mostly in the Yanaka area, each one devoted to one of the Seven Lucky Gods (who, while not at the top of the Japanese pantheon, are very well regarded in Japan). The Yanaka pilgrimage is said to be the oldest of many such pilgrimages in Japan. It looked achievable in not too long a time (especially considering this is my recovering-from-the-flight easy day), so I thought I’d give it a shot.

But first, I thought I’d visit a nice-looking shrine near my hotel that I randomly happened to spot on Google Maps, and it really was quite a nice looking shrine. Motomishima Shrine is its name, and it’s built on what seems to be a very small and very pointy hill, because the streets all around are pretty flat. As an added bonus, I was able to buy a book for getting goshuin, though the priest corrected me that it’s not called a “goshuinsho” but rather a “shuincho”. Basically, the priest presses down one or more large stamps with the temple’s seals, and then uses black ink and a brush the name of the temple, the day of the visit, and other messages on and around the stamped portions. They can be quite artistic. Sadly, the priest at Motomishima didn’t do it in front of me, so I couldn’t watch.

That done, I headed back to the station to head a few stops up the line to Tabata Station, the nearest station to Tokakuji, where the Yanaka pilgrimage starts. Turns out, by the way, that Motomishima Shrine is also the first stop of a Shichifukujin pilgrimage, this one called the “Shitaya Shichifukujin Meguri”, enshrining Jurokujin, the god of the elderly and longevity. It’s all north of the Yamanote Line, though, and I wanted to stay in Yanaka, which is on the south side, so I headed off as planned.

So, I got to Tokakuji, and… noone was there. Actually, noone seemed to be at Motomishima either, but I could see movement inside, and one of the other visitors called him out to talk to him. At Tokakuji, there was no sign of life at all, and the doors to the place where you can buy charms and fortunes and goshuin were locked, so I took some photos and moved on.

The roads around the temple were quite impressive, though – I couldn’t tell if it was natural or excavated, but the main road was in a deep trench, far below the houses and minor roads to either sides. Actually you’re probably going to see a lot of photos today of regular old roads. One thing I was quite pleased to discover, though, is that’s it’s still the middle of autumn-leaf season here. Vivid reds and yellows everywhere. Quite different from living in a primarily evergreen area.

I took a small diversion at this point to see a nearby Inari shrine, which are known for their red tori gates. It was quite small, but quite nice. There was also a poor woman raking up all the fallen leaves – quite different from living in a primarily evergreen area. =) I also dropped by Nishi-Nippori Station for a stamp, since it was right there.

So I moved on to the second temple… and found it also empty. It did, however, have in the attached graveyard the most serene terraced area, with no sound but the rustling of leaves and the chirping of birds – it was easy to forget that I was still standing in the middle of the biggest city in the world.

The third temple had a person present, but she seemed like she was a caretaker-type who was there to help some mourners rather than someone who’d do a goshuin for me. At that point, I decided to give up on the pilgrimage and just revert to the standard plan “do what looks pretty”.

First thing: the third temple is next door to a street named Fujimizaka (= Fuji-Viewing Slope) – as you might guess, you can see Mount Fuji from the top. Or to be more precise, you could, prior to May 2013, when a building was built that blocked the view. That’s rather a shame, because it was previously regarded as one of the best Mount Fuji views in all Japan. One would have thought they’d have considered that when planning, but I suppose the hill is quite a ways away, so they probably never considered it. There looks to be some kind of community project to restore the view, but it seems to consist of knocking down the offending building rather than constructing some manner of higher viewpoint or something. The photo on the right is my best guess as to the building in question.

At the top of the hill, I went to see Suwa Shrine, which was quite nice, with gingko trees dropping leaves all over. Headed on down the road, and when I hit a major road, I turned left to find Kyo-oji, which I popped into for a brief stickybeak, then headed on to Nippori Station for a stamp, since again it was right there. There was also a bridge in front of the station that one of the brochures from the hotel was advertising as a kind of open-air train museum. To be perfectly precise, though, it was literally a bridge that you could stand on and watch trains pass by, including the shinkansen, which by this point has surfaced. While the brochure’s claim that you can “view more than twenty trains at once”, it should be made clear that you can only do so with some patience.

Tennoji, the next temple on the pilgrimage was also quite proximate to Nippori Station, so I thought I’d give it a shot, and to my surprise, there was a priest. It is a more major temple than the first three, mind. Unfortunately, he sent me away to sit on a bench while he wrote the goshuin. At first he refused to do it, which momentarily perplexed me, until he told me I’d used the wrong verb to request it. Couldn’t tell if he was trying to crack some kind of dad joke, because he said it completely straight-faced.

Goshuin in hand, I moved out to view Yanaka Cemetery. Originally attached to Tennoji, the government at the time of the Meiji Restoration confiscated it and turned into what was at the time Japan’s largest public cemetery. I could go into more history, but I didn’t really stay here a long time – it was pretty enough, but I had a sudden revelation at this point that I’d forgotten why on Earth I’d wanted to come to Yanaka. It wasn’t for all the temples, or even for the rather pretty graveyard, it was for the ye olde streets and the Shitamachi atmosphere, of which the temples and graveyard are a fairly small part.

This revelation was helped in part by randomly passing an old house that had been converted into a small art gallery with free entry – I went into have a look, and I just loved that old building. I wandered a few other random streets, then pulled out the phone to re-research the best bits of Yanaka.

Turned out I was just around the corner from a huuge old cedar next to an old-style building. Its rooves were carpeted with needles. Not to mention several other quite pretty but quite incidental sights.

The big thing that most of the websites also suggested was Yanaka Ginza, a shopping street with a lot of small, old shops, but I also wanted to visit Nezu Shrine a lovely shrine in nearby Nezu (as I’m sure you could tell from the name). Both were roughly equidistant from me at that time, though ninety degrees apart. I decided to walk briskly to Nezu first and then Yanaka Ginza, as the latter would be closer to a train station to get back to the hotel again. I was getting fairly tired – by this point, it was 3pm, and I’d been strolling around since 10am, five hours earlier. So much for an easy day. Plus, sunset is at 4:30pm.

Arrived at Nezu not too much later and had a wander around. There was a hill up the back with lines of tori gates which I had a walk through. Quite small, though – I had to duck under them. Also, there was a priest doing goshuin, and this time he did it in front of me, so I’ve got some photos. I also drew an omikuji (fortune slip), and got “suekichi”, which the slip translated as “Not-so-good fortune” (it was in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean) but which according to my dictionary means “future good fortune”. Either way, I tied it to a wire with other peoples’ – tradition is to tie them on or near a pine tree, as the Japanese word for pine tree is a homophone for “to wait”, so the hopes are the bad luck will wait around at the shrine rather than following the person home. Since my fortune was “good luck to come later”, I wonder if that was a mistake in my case.

Headed towards Yanaka Ginza. On the way, I passed a Mos Burger – a Japanese burger chain, with some very Japanese burgers – and thought of popping in for a late lunch (hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast) or early dinner, but once I’d had that thought, my stomach again started protesting, which is a mite concerning. I managed to make it to Yanaka Ginza before actual sunset time, but not before it had already set below the surrounding buildings.

Yanaka Ginza was everything the internet promised. Quite a nice place, but getting rapidly darker. I grabbed some croquettes to munch on from a stall selling their remaining stock – a bit cold, but still quite nice. I also joined the throng buying a cup of amazake, sweet, slightly fermented rice – but more importantly, warm. It’s usually served in cold weather. I’m not a huge fan of alcohol, but I’ve been kinda wanting to try this. It didn’t taste of alcohol, but… it was almost unpleasantly sweet. Basically, the starches in the rice had been turned to sugar, but then were stopped before they went all the way to alcohol. Don’t think I’d have it again. On the plus side, I saw a woman pushing three cats in a stroller.

I headed to the top of Yanaka Ginza… to find myself standing at Kyo-oji again. Yes, that was where I turned left to reach Nippori Station many hours and even more paragraphs ago. If I’d turned right instead of there, Yanaka Ginza was barely a block away. So annoyed with myself about that.

Headed back to the hotel, playing a bit with the time lapse setting on my camera to take photos of trains while crossing the overpass.

I got back to the hotel to finish checking in and actually move into my room. It’s a single room, but the bed is quite large – for a moment, I was afraid they’d put me in a double. It’s kinda like the double-lobed room James and I were in in Osaka during the last trip, though of course with only one lobe.

I was originally planning to just rest up for a bit, then go see some night sights, but once I’d gotten a bit warmed up, I started to feel even a bit feverish. I’m starting to wonder if my butterflies-in-the-stomach feelings, general lack of appetite, and rather concerning lack of excitement are due more to illness than nerves. I’m honestly starting to worry myself with how little I feel excited to be here, especially considering how I felt about the trip during the planning stages. Guess we’ll see how things progress.

Also, this post has taken me a while to write, and it’s getting quite long, even for me. Gonna have to try even harder to be more concise.

Time for bed. Today was lovely brilliant sunshine all day, so I’m hoping that continues.

Here’s the goshuin I got today. From the right, it’s Motomishima Shrine, Tennoji Temple, Nezu Shrine. Also got four station stamps: Uguisudani, Tabata, Nishi-Nippori and Nippori.

Today’s photo count: Six hundred and forty-two.

Today’s step count: 19,768, according to the phone. 13.9km. I brought a stand-alone pedometer, but I wasn’t wearing it today.

So! Headed off to Japan today!

Japan, Land of the Rising Sun (being a literal translation of “nihon”, the Japanese name of the country). It’s the tenth most populous country in the world, but only sixty-first largest in area, or a bit less than half the size of New South Wales. It’s one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the world, with 98.5% of the population being ethnically Japanese. The Emperor of Japan is, according to Wikipedia, the world’s only remaining head of state whose English title is “emperor” – actually the Japanese title is closer to “heavenly sovereign”.

It wound up being an unreasonably early start, and it’s currently already getting unreasonably late even in Japanese time, so I’m going to attempt to blog quickly, even though that never works. Actually, it’s rapidly approaching the point where I’ve been up for twenty-four hours.

I decided to book a daytime flight for the trip to Japan – basically because I sleep so poorly on planes that if I tried an overnight flight, I’d be completely out of it the next day, so I’d lose a whole day either way. (Mind you, I was perfectly ok after an overnight flight to London a few years ago – I might have to do more experimentation on this subject). I flew Qantas, because it’s cheaper than Jetstar for some reason, but the only Qantas daytime flights go via Melbourne. Melbourne!

It also leaves from Sydney at 6am, which meant, to play it safe, a 4am check-in, which in turn meant I got about three hours’ sleep last night, after finishing all my last few bits of packing. You know how when you’re awake at 3am, you sometimes have the most horrible sort of thoughts that you’d never have any other time? I woke up with the alarm, so nervous about the trip that for a moment I honestly wondered whether I actually wanted to go back to Japan again. Fortunately, I got over that. =)

I booked my first ever Uber to come pick me up, and we’d just gotten on Southern Cross Drive when I suddenly remembered I’d forgotten my carry-on jumper. Since it’s my warmest, bulkiest jumper (which is why I was going to carry it rather than pack it), I didn’t really have any option of just managing without it, so we had to drive all the way to Wentworth Avenue so we could do a u-turn and come all the way back. Rather annoying.

Still managed to arrive at the airport before 4am, fortunately. Unfortunately, they don’t open the doors until 4am anyway, and they don’t even start opening the check-in counters until closer to 5. There was a whole hour between my flight and the next one at the same terminal. Fortunately, we boarded without a hitch. They served us breakfast – a plastic bowl of Just Right, which I somehow managed to spill all over my table. Sadly, no seat-back screens – they did have the app streaming service thing, but I’d left my iPad in the overhead locker before I realised I’d need it. Oh well, it was only a short flight.

I transferred to the International terminal at Melbourne – my luggage had been checked all the way through from Sydney, fortunately, so I didn’t have to worry about collecting it. I’m certain I heard my name over the PA as I was passing through Duty Free, but the guy at the gate had no knowledge of it. Boarded when boarding time came, settled into the seat, and started watching movies.

It’s a ten-hour flight from Melbourne to Narita, so I had plenty of time to catch up on movies. I saw the animated Batman and Harley Quinn, then Baby Driver, then Boss Baby, then a pair of Chinese films – Kung Fu Yoga, basically a kung fu Indiana Jones starring Jackie Chan as a renowned archaeologist named… Jack Chan, and The Monkey King, another retelling of parts of the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West (which we know in the West as Monkey, or Monkey Magic). Dunno if I was just getting too tired, but I didn’t find myself engaging with the last one all that much.

They fed us pretty much constantly. Shortly after takeoff (which was at 9), they served us a sort of… brunch. Or elevenses. Either way, I had four-cheese ravioli, though the beef dish looked quite nice too. Then there was a Weiss raspberry and ice cream bar, then hot chocolate (or tea and coffee), then pear and raspberry bread, then shortly before landing, some udon noodles.

Landed in Narita just before 6pm, or some time after sunset. Sadly, they’ve removed the people-mover that used to connect the gates with the main concourse, replacing it with an extended moving walkway. Ah well, at least I get to ride the moving walkways instead. Got through customs just fine, got some cash from a convenient ATM, and headed downstairs to get my JR Pass – as covered during our last trip, the JR Pass gives us free travel on all JR trains across Japan with the exception of the very fastest shinkansen.

The exchange office is much bigger than I remember. Fortunately, there was no queue, so it was pretty much just straight in and straight out for me. Decided to start the pass today, even though that means it’ll run out two days before I leave – it’s only a fourteen-day pass and I’m here for sixteen. My flight out leaves from Haneda, and the express from Narita to Tokyo costs a whole lot more than the monorail from Tokyo to Haneda, so it made more sense to ensure the more expensive trip was covered by the pass.

I was given a seat on the next Narita Express to leave, so no long wait this time. Once at Tokyo Station, I transferred to the Yamanote loop line to Okachimachi, my old nemesis from the last trip. All in all, though, a far smoother journey than our first night last time.

I’d intended to stay in the Toyoko Inn chain of business hotels for most nights on this trip – they’re cheap, clean, easily accessible, and they’re everywhere. Trouble is, when it came time to book, I discovered that not a single Toyoko Inn near central Tokyo has availability on this specific night. So instead I found one with availability for the rest of my time in Tokyo, and decided to find another type of hotel I’ve been meaning to try, mostly so that I can say I’ve done it: a capsule hotel.

So, I’m staying in the Capsule Net Omotenashi no Oyado in Ueno. It’s… different. You take your shoes off when you come in the front door, and leave them in lockers nearby. Then they give you a wrist bracelet with a locker key and a bed number, and a bag with a towel and some pyjamas, and you walk through the whole building shoeless (except there’s slippers in the toilets). Sadly, my suitcase is too big to fit in the locker, so it’s going to be spending the night under guard in the lobby. Here’s my capsule – the one with the light on.

There’s a pretty extensive bunch of facilities here, from a public bath in the basement to a cafe-slash-reading-room with a ginormous collection of manga to read. In Japanese only, though.

After I checked in, I decided to head out for a bit of a late dinner. One advantage of this hotel’s location is that it’s right near Ameya Yokocho, which I’ve been wanting to visit for a while. Ameya Yokocho is a shopping street running from Ueno Station to Okachimachi Station, with shops built under the elevated Yamanote line tracks the entire way along. It was originally a black market following World War II.

There’s all sorts of little eateries all the way along it, though I actually wound up eating at a place a little way away, at an udon restaurant called Hinamaru. I had a special “seasonal recommendation” called Shouga Tamago Ankake, or starchy egg-and-ginger udon. That really hit the spot – it’s cold here. Oh, I knew what the temperature was going to be before coming, but I somehow never semm to remember what that actually feels like. There was also various tempura available as sides, but the ones I got were a bit cold.

I also popped into a bookshop to see if I could buy a stamp book. Japan has special souvenir rubber stamps pretty much everywhere – train stations, castles, other land marks – which you can use to stamp on things (i.e. they don’t give you the stamp itself) so I thought I’d buy one of the special books they sell so that you can collect them. I got two stamps today, Ueno Station and Okachimachi Station. I had to ask the attendant where the books were, and in doing so had my first interaction completely in Japanese. He understood me – yay! – but… didn’t know the answer, so he had to go look it up.

I was also hoping to buy a goshuinsho, a similar sort of book, but more fancy, intended for the special stamps called “goshuin” you can get at many temples and even some shrines, but they didn’t have any, so I’ll have to try somewhere else tomorrow.

Anyway, been a long day. Time for bed.

Today’s photo count: Three hundred and four.

In just two days, I’ll be headed off to Japan again! Finally, for the first time since our trip seven years ago. Just me for this trip, though.

Originally, planning for this trip started as another SpockSoc trip, but everyone who’d originally expressed interest pulled out one by one until it was just James and I left. We decided to just go with the two of us anyway, but when it came time to nail down the actual itinerary, we hit a small snag – I wanted to go this year (partly because some things I wanted to do are only on now, partly to get the contrast between the summer of our last trip with winter now, and partly from sheer impatience), while James preferred to go next year (partly because he’s used up much of his leave for this year, and partly because winter is cooold). I pondered for a while how to resolve this deadlock, until I came up with a sudden brainwave:

So, I’m going on my own now, and we’ll go again next year, probably in the Easter holidays. Soon as we can make plans. I’m taking the opportunity on this trip to visit a few places that are high-up on my extremely extensive “places I’d like to visit” list, but are a little bit further from the beaten path, so I don’t have to feel guilty about dragging James off on a three-hour train trip.

I’m hoping for some pretty nice weather – a lot of my plans are outdoors, with no real contingency plans. One of my favourite sightseeing methods is to simply go wandering down whichever street or alleyway catches my eye, so you’ll probably find I’ll be doing a lot of that this trip. I’ve also gotten a better hold on how to blog more easily, so unless I’m extremely busy, expect to see in-line photos for every post. Still haven’t learnt the trick of blogging more concisely, though.

Sadly, I never got around to going back to adding photos to the posts from our previous trip. I have, however, made a digital scrapbook out of both of our photos and an edited version of the blog text. If you’d like, you can view the pages from it on Facebook – you don’t need to be friends with me to view them, but you do need to be logged in. At least, last I checked – let me know if it’s not working. It’s actually a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch printed book, so the pages on Facebook are a little small – if you’re geographically close to me in Real Life and want to see the real thing, just ask me sometime.

I confess I’m a little bit nervous about this trip – while I have learnt Japanese, my listening ability is still not great, and it’s my first solo trip to a non-English speaking country. My itinerary is all pencilled in, but I won’t know if it’s actually going to work (or if I’m going to run out of daylight every day) until I actually try it – fortunately, aside from my hotels, only one or two things are fixed to a particular day, so I can rearrange as weather or energy levels require.

Just a day and a half to go…