Ryan's Tokyo Adventures and Pics

2007-04-15T12:03:00.000+09:00

Azabujuban Summer Festival Mid to Late August (8-19 and 8-20)

My neighborhood in Tokyo, Azabujuban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azabu ) hosts a yearly summer festival that co-incides with the Bon Festival ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Festival ). The Azabu festival is one of the biggest in the Tokyo area, it runs for 3 or 4 days and attracts 80,000 people a day. The festival is basically a big street fair, it has tons of street vendors selling food, kids toys, clothes and random knick knacks. There’s also a lot of dances, music and other street performances as part of the festival as well. One of the main streets involved in the festival was the street right in front of my apartment so I spent a lot of time checking out the festival and I took a number of photos and some videos, to see the full set on flickr click here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/rrbhs99/sets/72157600077429778 ) or just check them out below (click on the pictures to see larger versions of them):

The festival is very family oriented and has a lot of children's activities, especially around pets, as you can see below one of the popular festival stalls allows kids to catch fish and turtles which they take home as pets:

Beatles are also a very popular children's summer pet in Japan:

The festival had tons of kids toys:

This is my front door, it's normally a lot less crowded, the upside was that all I had to do was walk outside and I was right in the middle of the festival:

The neighborhood was very crowded, 10,000's of thousands of people came out each day:

The festival had a lot of traditional Japanese foods so I took photo's of a number of them to share with family and friends.

Grilled corn:

Grown by the corn people, for some reason I just loved this poster:

Tacoyaki - Or octopus balls, it's flour with chopped up octopus and a few other things baked into a ball:

Click on the photo and you can see the baking process:

This is the chopped octopus that goes into the baked balls:

This is the end result:

Lots of beer was for sale and in a very Japanese twist you could buy cucumbers on a stick to go with your beer:

This table defied explanation, I really don't know what it was they were trying to do:

Fire grilled fish like this is eaten whole including the head and the bones, the fish is salted and left by the fire to cook, it's really delicious:

Grilled octopus on a stick:

More squid and octopus on a stick:

Really big squid on a stick:

I can't think of the right name for this dish but it's really really good, it's vegetables, noodles and often meat cooked together using batter and then topped with an egg and a sauce somewhat like bar-b-q sauce, it's really great:

Lots more octopus:

If you click on the photo you'll get a better view of this, it's frozen children's candies, basically frozen lollipops

One of the most import parts of the Bon Festival is the Bon dance which is a very simple but very fun summer dance that anyone can participate in. Basically someone pounds on a drum along with other music and everyone dances around in a circle following basic dance steps:

These two women are trading off playing the bon dance drums:

The people shown below are all doing the bon dance, a lot of Japanese women where Yukata for Bon which is a cotton Kimono:

This is what the bon dance looks and sounds like:

As you can see the neighborhood was very crowded all weekend and the weather was great:

Right around the corner from my apartment they set up a performance stage and had all sorts of random performers all weekend, including a marching band:

This is the view of the crowd from my living room:

With all the vendors on the street, a lot of them used funny costumes and other tricks to draw attention like this guy:

And this guy who had a giant beer in his head and a grapefruit in his hand:

And these guys who yelled with signs

And this kid who had a giant drink on her back??

The best show on the performance stage were these guys, I'm really not sure how to describe it so check out the photo's and videos:

When the show ended each night the neighborhood loud speakers, yes my neighborhood had overhead loud speakers, would play Auld Lang Syne ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auld_Lang_Syne ) the new years song. It's a random thing that you often see when things close in Japan. The other very funny thing is that the vendors had to be gone within an hour, the whole place cleared out and cleaned up in an unbelievably fast period of time:

2007-03-18T07:18:00.000+09:00

Late August and Early September 2006

From the last post that’s been sitting on the web for six months it looks like I’ve been stuck forever in delayed flight hell. But, in reality that flight was just the beginning of the trip I took that week. I got into New York a day late due to the delay and that night I took a trip to Rhode Island with some friends, all told the door to door journey from Tokyo to Rhode Island was close to three days long. It was a long journey but it was worth it, I got to spend the weekend with my friends from college which was great. It was really nice to be able to be with native English speakers.

The trip didn’t actually end there, I wanted to see my family so the day after I got back from Rhode Island I flew from Newark to Seattle (after spending a day moving my belongings out of storage which is a whole other story).

As you can imagine I was pretty much seeing the world through airline windows at that point so I took a few photos along the way, these are all taken over Washington State on the way into Seattle:

Eastern Washington:

Mountains of Eastern Washington:

Clouds from the air over Washington State:

Mt. Rainier from the air on the way to Seattle:

2007-03-18T06:55:00.000+09:00

Hey everybody it’s been about 6 months since I last posted anything here and enough people have asked me what happened that I figured I should get caught up. Long story short things got busy and I fell behind in posting. The brief version of the missing six months is that I took 4 trips between the US and Japan, visited Hong Kong twice, flew across the US twice, took a trip to Vietnam and most recently spent some time in London. I am no longer living in Japan, my time there came to a successful end in January, I am now spending most of my time in the New York City area, but there is a possibility that I may end up in London for a few months this year, that’s a whole other story I’ll explain later.

I will be catching up on posts over the next couple of months, I have a lot of photos and stories to post so bear with me, I am going to continue in a chronological order. I hope you enjoy.

2006-09-14T08:33:00.000+09:00

The 8 Hour Round Trip Flight from Tokyo to Tokyo

On Thursday 8/24/06 I headed out to Narita airport for my second home leave. The trip from Tokyo to New York is never easy, it normally involves a 5 minute walk to the subway, 15 mins on the subway, a wait at the ANA hotel for the bus to the airport, a 2 hour plus bus ride (Narita is a long way from Tokyo), a few hours in the airport, a flight of just under 14 hours, an hour or so to clear customs at JFK and then an hour plus cab ride to my place in NJ.

That’s the normal trip, then there’s what happened on the 24^th and 25^th. My plane left Narita on time about 7PM Tokyo time and all seemed to be going well. But, about 4 to 4.5 hours into the flight I was enjoying a movie when we took a big left hand turn, which pointed us towards the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia. I have to admit while I would love to visit Siberia sometime, but I definitely think it should be a planned visit, so I wasn’t too sad when the plane continued to turn, but when it became clear that we had taken a 180 degree turn I was a bit confused.

The captain came on and as often happens on JAL flights made announcements in a lot of languages, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (the flight continues on to Brazil) and finally English. The announcements took a long time, so it was more than 15 mins before the English version came on.

One of the tires on the main landing gear was flat (there is a pressure gauge in each tire), not a really big issue because there are a number of tires on the gear but one that has to be dealt with, if I had been flying a US airline we would have either stopped in Alaska or continued on to JFK. There is a minor chance that in landing with a flat tire the landing gear could be damaged, or the tire could throw off debris and in the process damage the airframe or engine. JAL decided to bring us back to Tokyo because our plane was scheduled to continue on from New York to Brazil and they had no spare aircraft in New York in the unlikely event that our aircraft was damaged while landing.

As you can see from the photos we made it all the way to the date line before turning back:

So, we flew back to Tokyo and landed about 3:30 in the morning, JAL has two cameras mounted on all their planes one that looks down and one that looks forward. During take off and landing all the TV screens on the plane show the view looking forward. Interestingly they left the forward looking camera on for our emergency landing, so we had a great view of all the emergency and maintenance vehicles that were lined up on the side of the runway.

The captain made a very smooth landing, holding off on letting the main landing gear down as long as possible and nothing bad happened. We came to a stop on the runway and all the various vehicles descended on us, they continued to leave the camera on so we could see all the vehicles pull up and everyone walking around the front of the plane. We sat on the runway for about 20 to 30 minutes while they checked out the plane and eventually they brought out a tow rig and towed us to the terminal.

When we got to the terminal they unloaded everyone from the plane, handed us airline pillows and blankets and told us it would be 5-9 hours before we would depart again. Since I was in business class I was at least able to go to business class the lounge, where I joined about 200 fellow passengers in sleeping on the floor. JAL put all the families with kids in the lounge, which is very nice of them, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to go through this whole mess with young kids. Unfortunately it also meant that there were a ton of screaming kids all night long.

For those who think international business and the associated travel is glamorous lets just say spending a night sleeping on the floor of an airport with a few hundred people and an airline blanket and pillow isn’t very glamorous, which is the case all too often with the travel. The situation wasn’t helped by the current restrictions on carrying liquids on aircraft. Most of the passengers (myself included) had to check more luggage than normal (I would not normally have checked anything), so most people didn’t have clothes, toiletries, etc. I really felt for the parents with young kids, they were forced to check most of the kids stuff.

The fun continued when I woke up, it was sunny and the room was totally empty except for one other person. Everyone else was gone which left me more than a little worried that I had been left behind in Tokyo. I’m not sure why JAL left me asleep while waking everyone else up, but I jumped up grabbed my belongings and started running for the plane. As I ran they started to call final boarding, I got to the plane with less time to spare than was ideal. If I’d been left in Tokyo I would have been very unhappy. We finally left Tokyo and flew to New York, where the fun continued when we were told that customs wasn’t open so JAL wasn’t allowed to open the door of the plane and let us off. So, we spent an hour sitting on the plane in New York.

All told by the time I got out of JFK and took a cab to my place in New Jersey the travel door to door was a little over 40 hours. The really freaky thing was I saw the sunrise in Tokyo on Friday before boarding the plane the second time. Then we flew all day, had an entire night in the air and I watched the sun come up while we were north of Chicago, but it was Friday morning again, so I saw the sunrise twice on the same day.

2006-09-09T10:00:00.000+09:00

Why Time is Slower Here in Tokyo:

When I came back from my first home leave in July I decided to bring my alarm clock from home back with me to Tokyo. I’ve been waking up early in Tokyo to run and bike in the mornings and I like the multi-alarm function of my clock from home. I’ve used my clock since high school to wake up as early as 4:30AM to work out in the mornings, now that I sometimes wake up at 4:50AM here in Tokyo I figured I would bring the clock to Tokyo and set it up in my bedroom.

About a half an hour after I plugged in the clock here in Tokyo I walked past the clock and noticed that it was 3 or 4 minutes slower than the battery powered travel clock sitting next to it. I assumed that I had set it too slow, so I reset the clock from the US.

About an hour later I noticed that the clock was 8 minutes slow, at which point I realized that something really strange was happening, I left the clock plugged in overnight and by the morning it was close to an hour slow.

It didn’t take much thought to realize that the issue is the power supply. In Japan the electrical system is 100V rather than the US 110V, clearly digital clocks run about 10% slower when there is about 10% less voltage. That or time is slower here in Tokyo, either way my whole plan for using the US clock went out the window, so I took it back to my place in NJ at the end of August, it’s now a very well traveled bedside clock:

2006-09-09T09:40:00.000+09:00

Video of Shibuya Crossing from Above:

I’ve fallen behind on keeping up on blog posts, so the next few posts are about things that may be more than a month old.

A while back I was passing through Shibuya and remembered that one of my co-workers had told me that the Starbucks in Shibuya Crossing has a seating area with overhead views of the crossing. I stopped at Starbucks to check out the view and made the videos below:

2006-08-09T08:20:00.000+09:00

Climbing Mt. Fuji to see the Sunrise

One of the things I had been thinking about doing during my time here in Japan was to climb Mt. Fuji. There’s a two month climbing season during the months of July and August, it’s the only time when the weather is generally safe enough for non-professional climbers to climb the mountain. So, starting in July I got fairly serious about planning out the climb but I hadn’t picked a date or made any arrangements. Then my language tutor mentioned that she would be on vacation and thus would have to cancel our Saturday lessons for the weekend of August 5^th.

I jumped at the chance to climb Mt. Fuji on August 5^th because it’s also happened to be the three year anniversary of the day I left my childhood home in Berkeley, CA forever and moved to New York City (my parents sold the house I grew up in about a month after I moved to New York).

Along with the anniversary of leaving Berkeley there was another big reason for the timing of the climb, I’ve been really enjoying Tokyo so in late July I agreed to stay in Tokyo for quite some time. I was originally going to be here for three months, I may potentially now be here for as long as a year. Since this is a consulting engagement, I don’t know the actual length of the stay, there is never that type of certainty in consulting but I will be here for a while.

So, that left me with two more big reasons to climb the mountain, the first was to celebrate the close of an amazing three years in New York and the other was to really kick start my life in Tokyo. I had an amazing three years in the New York area between late 2003 and mid 2006, maybe I’ll end up back in the NYC area sometime in the future, but for now my time there has come to a close, so I wanted to use the climb to celebrate and think over these past three years. And until I committed to a longer stay in Tokyo I hadn’t been really that invested in building a life here, I was really looking at my time here as a long business trip. Once I had committed to being here in Tokyo much longer I decided it’s time to really start building a life here and going on adventures, so I climbed Mt. Fuji to symbolically kick off my life in Tokyo.

What follows is the story and photos of the climb, I highly recommend clicking on the images to see them in larger size:

There is a long tradition of climbing Mt. Fuji here in Japan, along with the historical and cultural reasons for the climbing tradition there is also a religious pilgrimage if you read the wikipedia entry it explains some of this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Fuji ). For those who do the full pilgrimage you start at the very first station way down at sea level, the climb is broken into ten stations, the tenth being the summit. I did what most climbers do which is take a bus to station five at 2300 meters (7500 ft).

As you can see from the photo below I arrived at my starting point (station five) at 7500 ft on the mountain just about at sunset, a little before 8PM. As background I had gotten a really really bad sun burn the weekend before so I intentially timed my arrival on the mountain with sunset to avoid high altitude sun:

The sunset was great, in the opposite direction was the view of the mountain, it was ominously tall and as I looked at it thinking that I had until the sun came back around the earth to hit the top it was a bit sobering. I took photos of myself throughout the climb to show the extreme change in temperatures that happened as the altitude increased. In the photo below I’m just off the bus enjoying the cool mountain air (it was 90+ degrees in Tokyo that day).

Here’s Mt. Fuji as seen from station five just at sunset, at 12,388 ft I’m about 5,000 below the summit at the moment.
The next photo I took about 30 minutes later shows the moon setting behind the summit

I spent about 30 to 40 minutes hanging out at station five and eating some food for dinner that I had thrown into my pack in Tokyo. As you can see from the photo it was cool enough that I had to throw my jacket on, and it was dark enough that I put on my headlamp:

Just after 8PM I decided it was time to hit the trail, so I walked through the assembled mass of climbers (click on the photo and you can see a ton of climbers sprawled out on the ground) at station five and started hiking:

About twenty minutes into the hike I came to the first trail crossing which had this sign with a map of the climbing route, I started at 8PM at the “Fuji Subaru Line”. The reason I took this photo is that there are multiple ways up and down the mountain, I didn’t have a map, so to avoid returning to the wrong place the next morning I took this photo to refer back to:

A few minutes later I was hiking along with my fellow climbers (there was already a good number of people on the trail) in the darkness and a very odd thing happened. Off in the distance further up the mountain we started hearing a woman’s voice in both Japanese and English. The woman was saying things like “Mt. Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan…….. Do not climb the mountain without winter clothing……..Do not leave trash on the mountain……….First aid is available at station 7…….In the event of a storm retreat to the nearest hut”. It was very surreal, but once I came over a crest and saw that the announcement was coming from a safety point operated by the prefecture police department it made sense. As you can see in the photo the police stopped each climber and gave them a safety sheet with a map on it (so I thankfully ended up with a map of the mountain):

I took this photo about 8:30 and as you can see I have taken off the jacket and I’ve worked up a sweat it was fairly warm at this altitude and I was moving at a good clip.

Another really random thing happened when the clock struck 9PM, two or three cities way off in the distance started fix works shows. There are a lot of summer fireworks shows in Japan, especially here in Tokyo. Between 9PM and 10PM I had a great view of at least 3 shows albeit from a long way off. Mt. Fuji is much taller than anything else near it so you can see a long way. From time to time on the trail I would stop at look at the fireworks but I mostly had to focus on the trail to avoid tripping and falling in the darkness, although when the finale of the biggest show happened at 10, I stopped to watch, it was HUGE.

The next photo is taken at a mountain hut at 2700 meters which is about 8850 feet. It was about 9:15PM when I reached this point, so I was making good progress up the mountain.

As you can see, it’s still warm and I am still not wearing a jacket. It was getting cool enough that when I stopped to drink from my water bottle I’d get a chill. Speaking of water, to combat altitude sickness I went on a crazy hydration regimine. I bought four 2 liter bottles of water and drank one in Tokyo that day, one on the bus on the way to the mountain and then took more than 4 liters up the mountain. Hauling all the weight from the water up the mountain is part of why I’m so sweaty, it was nice to drink that weight off my back:

There were a lot of Torii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii) along the trail, they are part of the religious pilgrimage, there’s also temples on the mountain related to the pilgrimage:

I had been warned that the mountain would be crowded and this was where I started to really hit the crowds, we would often bottle neck at points where only one person could pass (in most parts of the mountain two or three people can walk next to each other):

The climb is supposed to take 5 to 5 and ½ hours, so my reason for starting at 8PM was that I planned to hike to a high altitude and then rent a sleeping spot at one of the mountain huts. Along the way there are a number of huts, they offer food, warmth and a place to sleep. The place to sleep only costs $5 to $10 dollars, paid by the number of hours you stay, as you can see in the photo below the place to sleep is just one person worth of floor space (click on the image and you’ll see there are several hundred climbers sleeping next to each other). Due to the crowds I decided not to stop to sleep, which turned out to be a very good idea:

Here’s one of the crowd bottle necks, it took 10 to 15 minutes to clear this one, I would hit many:

Despite the crowds I was still making great progress up the mountain and it was still pretty warm when I took this photo a little after 10PM:

About 10:10 and I am at 3100 meters (10,100 ft), near the 7^th station:

A little while later I passed through the eight station, at this point I was thinking I would possibly have time to stop and sleep:

The higher I got the crowds got thicker and my progress up the mountain got slower, it was very odd running into crowds you would expect at Grand Central Station in New York at close to 11,000 ft on a volcano in the middle of the night:

Many climbers buy a walking/climbing stick like the one you can see in the hands of the climber in front of me. They all have bells attached to them so all night there was the constant ringing of many many bells. Also, each of the mountain huts had a special emblem that they had designed into a metal poker. The huts heat the pokers in fires and climbers pay 100 to 200 yen to have the emblem of the huts burned into their climbing sticks:

You can see the bells on the climbing sticks in this photo, they are tied on with blue and red twine:

I reached 3250 meters (10,660 ft) a little after 11PM, only 525 meters from the summit, it seamed like I would be there in no time:

Above 10,000 feet it became very cold, it would eventually drop to freezing and maybe a little below freezing. The week before I bought a winter hat and gloves in Tokyo, I put them and my parka on (shortly after I took this photo my headlamp batteries died, thankfully I had a flash light in my pocket and a spare set of batteries in my pack):

About midnight all progress ground to a halt because of the crowds, at times I would wait for 10 to 15 minutes just to take a step forward, the whole while the person behind me would be pressed into my pack, and I would be pressed into the person in front of me by the crowds. There were a couple of things that caused the slow down. First thing there was A TON of people on the mountain, many thousands (you’ll see the daylight photos of this further down). The crowds were especially bad this weekend because it had rained during most of July, making the mountain un-climbable during the first half of the season, so two months worth of climbers were forced to climb in one month (August). The second issue, is that above 10,000 altitude sickness started to really get to people, if someone got sick or passed out on the trail at a point where only one person at a time can walk the whole line of climbers would stop.

The Japanese had a very unique thing they did for altitude sickness, many of them carried tiny oxygen bottles, only about the size of an aerosol can of household cleaner (you could buy them on the mountain). They clearly didn’t carry enough oxygen for more than a quick fix, and I doubt it did them much good, but many climbers had them. Those who were worst off with altitude sickness would end up next to the trail wrapped in an emergency blanket sucking oxygen from a can. On a side note, I saw one climber 20 minutes into my climb (at 8:20) who was already in that state more than 5,000 below the top of the mountain, there were a lot of people who aren’t in the right condition to hike above 12.000 ft were on the mountain.

The other really big factor in the complete slow down on the mountain was that a good percentage of the Japanese climbers on the mountain climb as part of a tour group. Each tour group had 50 plus people in them and the tour groups would start and stop whenever a person in the group didn’t feel well. Each time a tour group started or stopped you would get this mass of people herded onto or off the trail, and everything would grind to a halt. The funny thing with the tour group was that the tour guides use the lighted wands that you normally see airline employees use at the airport to direct airplanes as they taxi around the airport, except on the mountain they are used to direct tour group members. It’s really comical to see a tour guide standing on a boulder next to the trail yelling in Japanese “WALK THIS WAY, WALK THIS WAY!!!!!” While frantically waving their lighted wands, especially because there is only one trial up there, jam packed with people so it’s quite obvious where to walk. At one point I was standing in line next to one of the tour guides for 25 minutes while he yelled and waved, I have to admit at 2:30 in the morning I was ready the strangle the guy to shut him up.

I spent between 1AM and 4AM barely moving with the crowds, the top of the mountain was so close and yet so far, and it was below freezing. During that time frame, probably about 3:15AM there was an amazing group of shooting stars streaking across the sky, along with the shooting stars the view of the stars in general at that altitude was very beautiful, the swath milky way was very visible. Things were so slow that I almost fell asleep while standing a few times, I also sometimes sat down next to the trail because we weren’t moving, that was dangerous though because I would start to fall asleep as soon as I sat down.

I was worried at this point because I was stuck in a crowd a few hundred feet below the summit of the mountain and I wasn’t sure I would beat the sunrise to the top of the mountain. As you can see in the photo below a little before 4AM the horizon started to brighten, I was convinced at this point that I would not make it for the sunrise due to the crowds:

It was still dark on the mountain, and I was still moving with the crowd:

As you can see there were a lot of places where it was single file:

I took this photo looking back down the mountain, if you click on it to enlarge it you can see the endless train of headlamps the runs all the way back down the mountain:

Rather unexpectedly the crowds thinned and suddenly we were moving. Some of the people around me, worried like I was that we would miss the sunrise literally started running up the mountain. I came to the dragons below and stopped to take their photo, I was so out of it from lack of sleep and the altitude light headedness that I didn’t notice for two or three minutes that they mark the entrance to station ten which is the top of the mountain. I was literally thinking, well this looks like a nice place to stop and watch the sunrise, since I don’t seem to be able to make the top of the mountain. Then I looked up and realized, I was on the top of the mountain!!!! It was about 4:15 AM at this point so it had taken me a little less than 8.5 hours to climb the mountain:

This is the other dragon, there was one on each side of the trail:

The gate shown in this photo marks the entrance to station 10 and the end of the climb:

Looking back through the gate at the horizon, which continued to lighten with the coming sunrise:

I was elated to have made it to the top in time, but I found myself in a rather unexpected situation, there are a series of mountain huts that make up station 10, the trial dumps you right into them and there was a HUGE crowd around the huts. I was at the top of the mountain, stuck in a crowd, 10 people back from the view:

This is one of the huts, serving food and drinks to climbers, behind him was a rest area where people could sit and be warm (if they bought something from the hut):

And this is the crowd I was stuck in, I was determined to fight my way through the crowd to get away from the huts:

More crowd:

I managed to get through the crowds and then hiked up the rim of the volcano to find a place to watch the sunset, there were a lot of people on the rim as can be seen in the photo below:

The horizon continued to grow brighter:

I settled into a nice spot on the rim with a good view. It was light enough that I was able to take off my head lamp, it was still very cold:

The colors on the horizon continued to be beautiful and the stars began to fade out:

I sat amongst the crowd, eating Oreos and Powerbars for breakfast waiting for the sun to rise (it’s about 4:30AM at this point):

Everyone on the mountain was talking in excited hushed tones waiting for the sunrise:

Getting closer:

I asked a group of German tourist near me to take a photo of me while we were waiting for the sun, as you can see it was mighty cold up there:

I should point out that many of my photo’s of the sunrise use my zoom lens, this is a zoomed photo:

This is also a zoomed photo:

This is what it looked like without the zoom:

As the sky brightened the crater came into view, I was sitting less than 10 feet from the edge:

The size of the crowd also became obvious in the light:

A hush fell over the crowd as it became obvious the sun was about to come up (somewhere between 4:45 and 4:50AM), when the first sliver came into view there were all sorts of excited yells and everyone just stared (click on the photo to see a bigger version, NOTE: These are zoomed):

Here comes the sun:

Without the zoom and with the crowd:

I’ll let the sunrise speak for itself (click on the images for a much better :

The moment the sun was fully risen, someone yelled something in Japanese and the whole crowd responded by cheering Bonzai!!! Bonzai!!!! Bonzai!!! At the top of their lungs. Hearing more than 5,000 people (maybe even 10,000 counting the people below us on the mountain) cheer all at once like that was amazing. I had no idea it would happen, but I did get a photo of the third Bonzai!!!!!:

And then the sun was up, the sunrise was amazingly beautiful and made the hike so worth it:

I asked someone on the mountain next to me to take a photo of me shortly after sunrise, it was still cold up there:

The sun cast a shadow across the crater. As you can see there is a station on the far side of the crater, there are multiple ways to climb up the mountain, that station is the top of another one of the trails. You can also climb around the rim of the crater to that station. One of the big reasons to come up that side of the mountain is that Mt. Fuji casts a shadow across the countryside behind it, I’ve seen photos of the shadow and it looks very cool. I will have to climb that side of the mountain some time to see the shadow:

This is a close up of the station on the far side of the rim:

And here’s the crowd on my side of the mountain:

You can see the collection of buildings at the top of the mountain that make up station ten and how unbelievably crowded the top of the mountain was, there were literally THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE!!!!!! What really jumped out at me was how colorful everyone was, if you click on the picture you can see everyone is wearing bright outdoors clothing, the bright colors really jumped out in the early morning light. After spending a night hiking in total darkness by the light of a headlamp it was really shocking to see all those bright colors after many hours in the dark.

More of the crowd:

The Japanese flag you can see on the far side of the crowd was hoisted up at sunrise:

The sun brought warmth to the mountain which was really nice after spending many hours with temperatures in the 30’s:

If you click on this image to enlarge it, you can see what one of the tour groups looks like, this one is hiking along a trail on the far side of the rim:

There were a lot of random reactions to the sunrise, one was that this group pulled out a bunch of flags:

It's getting warmer but still not that warm:

Looking across the crater:

This group was standing on one of the edges of the crater:

I walked quite a ways around the crater, I took this photo a few hundred yards around the crater:

Eventually I came back to the area I had watched the sunrise from, the crowd was hanging out enjoying the sun.

People were continuing their various celebrations of the sunrise, the older generation who make up most of the religious pilgrims were praying and sometimes crying. Among the younger generation people sang, cheered, waved flags, a few of them also cried, and everyone enjoyed the view.

There were two reactions that were hilarious, first there were two guys my age who tore their shirts off and took photos of themselves flexing their muscles with the sun between them (I unfortunately didn’t get a photo). And then there were four guys who put on dress shirts, ties and sport coats. They got dressed up, pulled out musical instruments and started singing and dancing for the sun. If you click on the image below you can see two of the four (one is in his dress clothes):

Everywhere I went I continued to be trapped in the crowd:

While wandering around the top of the mountain I came to a place where I could look back down at the trail I had hiked up. When I saw the crowds I was dumb struck, this is what I had been stuck in for all those hours in the middle of the night. Click on the next couple of images, you have to keep in mind that the people are in many zig zags above each other (I have a later photo that shows the zig zags from below):

Click on this image:

The buildings mixed in with the crowds are the mountain huts and stations on the climbing route (click to get a better view):

I was standing here, looking down at the crowds:

This is the gate at the top of the trail that all those people are trying to get to (also the gate I passed through when I got up):

After looking at the crowds coming up the mountain for a while I continued on around the rim for a while to see what it looked like:

I thought this looked really cool, it looks like the hikers are walking off into the clouds (we were a few thousand feet above the top of a thin cloud layer):

This photo is looking back around the rim at the spot where I watch the sunrise, I was just below and to the right of the gate:

About this time I decided it was time to start down the mountain, it’s supposed to take 4+ hours to get down and given my lack of sleep I figured I had better get moving. This photo shows the top of the descent trail (there are two parallel trails one for going up and one for going down):

Because of my nasty sunburn the week before I had to put on a lot of sunscreen and I also put on a lot of sun protective clothing, like my hat and bandana:

This gives you an idea how step the mountain is, and also shows the cloud layer at a lower altitude:

Here’s the beginning of the downward trail as I started walking down:

These next few photos I took on my way down looking across the mountain at the people who were still climbing up. These are the same people shown in the earlier photos that I took from the top looking down This gives you an idea of the crowds I had to hike through to get to the top of the mountain, it was just as bad when I came up in the dark.

The descent trail also had some pretty good crowds, although it wasn’t packed as tightly as the trail coming up. As anyone who hikes regularly can tell you, hiking down hill is often harder on your body than hiking up. On Mt. Fuji this was especially true because you are hiking on loose sand and volcanic rock while going on a fairly steep down hill grade, so it was dusty and very easy to stumble and fall which I did often as did the people around me.

It was pretty warm on the way down as you can tell in the photo below, no more jacket, it was hot, sweaty and dusty:

The crowd going down:

Looking across at the crowd going up:

A mountain hut lower on the mountain:

The descent trial below me:

The next couple of photos are looking across the mountain at the line of people climbing up towards the top:

The photos that I took from the top of the mountain that looked like the crowd was bunched together were showing these zig zags from below you can see what it actually looks like (click on the image to see more detail):

This photo shows the descent trail below me, if you click on it you can see there are many many switch backs, probably 50+, about this point I was hating life, I’d been hiking for many many hours, my legs were dead from the hike up (at times my legs were shaking), I’d fallen down a number of times due to the loose sand and I was hurting. Every time I looked down I would see all the switch backs and I’d realized how many more I had to go through, I decided not to count and not to look very often:

Looking back up the mountain:

This photo is about half way down the trail, if you click on the image you can see all the people in the switch backs I've hiked down:

And the switch backs ahead of me can be seen below, the building shown in the photo is a bathroom. The Japanese don’t appear to believe in taking a piss on the mountain the way you would see American hikers do, so you have to pay to use a bathroom at one of the huts like the one shown. I have to say this was one of my least favorite parts of the climb you have to pay a 100 to 200 yen “cleaning fee”. And yet despite the cleaning fee the bathrooms were heinously disgusting:

About 10AM I made it back to the 5^th station, 14 hours after setting out. I had been hiking for more than 12 or those 14 hours without sleep, needless to say I was tired. And as you can see I was pretty dirty. I had two hours until my bus so I sat down in the shade and slept for a while:

Shortly before I boarded my bus I walked over to the shrine at station five, it’s part of the religious pilgrimage to the top of the mountain. It had been closed the night before when I started, so I took a quick look around:

I boarded a bus back to Shinjuku at noon at station five, and was back in Tokyo by 2:30, when I got back to my apartment about 3PM I took the photo below to show how dirty I was, the look on my face tells you how tired I was:

I had left my apartment the day before about 2:30PM and come back about 3PM, the hike was an amazing adventure packed into only 24 hours. The hike was totally worth it, the sunrise was beautiful, as were the shooting stars, fireworks, and views from the top. Climbing the mountain was a terrific adventure and given the lack of sleep during the whole adventure I jumped into bed about 4PM and slept 15 hours straight, it was one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had in a long time after one of the best adventures I’ve had in a long time.

2006-08-01T21:44:00.000+09:00

My New Ride

As many of my friends and family know I really like biking and I spend a lot of time on my bike when I am at home in the US. So, because of my love of biking I had been considering getting a bike over here for a few weeks to explore and to work out on. Tokyo is a really bike friendly city, people ride bikes everywhere here. And amazingly enough there is so little fear of crime that many people leave their bikes on the street with NO LOCK!!!

There is some amount of bike theft here, and one of the main ways they deal with it is that all bikes are required to be registered with the police. The registration happens when you buy the bike, and you aren’t supposed to buy/sell a used bike without the police registration paperwork that proves that you own the bike.

I thought about buying a used bike like I did when I was assigned to work in Boston but as soon as I learned that the police registration forms are in Japanese I decided I had better stick to bike shops with new bikes. My worry with used bikes was that someone could have sold me a stolen bike and given me a random piece of paper that had Japanese characters on it and I wouldn’t know whether I was getting the registration or a receipt from a restaurant.

So, I shopped around at local bike shops for a new bike with the plan of reselling it when my time here in Tokyo comes to an end. Based on talking with the guys at the bike shop and some expats on the street who had nice bikes, it appears that I can count on getting 50% to 60% of what I paid back by selling the bike either on the web, newspaper classifieds or using neighborhood message boards.

I spent some time mulling over whether to get a cheap bike or a nice bike and I have to admit I bought a nice bike. Most people in Tokyo use really cheap one speed bikes (literally no transmission) to bike around the city. There are millions of those bikes around and amazingly enough many people don't even lock their bikes, they just prop them up on the sidewalk with little fear of theft. I looked at and tired various cheap bikes like that and a few more moderately priced bikes, and didn't like the feel of them all that much. One of the issues with the cheap bikes is that a lot of the bikes here also have small frames, because of how short people here are. So when I test rode a lot of the cheaper bikes I looked like I was on a clown bike.

So I ended up buying a nice hybrid which is good for Tokyo streets, it's a road frame but with much wider tires, which is very important for the riding here. During my home leave I poached all my bike stuff (helmet, etc) off my US bike, and now I’ve been checking out Tokyo via bike. Now, I just have to make sure to remember to look the wrong way (Japan drives on the English side of the road)

2006-08-01T21:43:00.000+09:00

Cleaning Ladies

My apartment here is a “serviced apartment” which means I have maids who clean three times a week. On one hand it’s clearly a nice privilege to not have to worry about cleaning up after myself. On the other hand the cleaning people here in Japan take service to a whole new level which can make for some odd situations. For instance, here’s a few of the odd situations I’ve run into:

-I have piles of change that I leave sitting on the counter in my apartment as a reminder to spend it (Japanese currency uses a lot of coins). On the way out the door the other day I was in a rush and I accidentally knocked over five piles of coins. I came home and found that the apartment cleaning staff had neatly re-arranged the piles of coins for me.

-If I leave dirty dishes in the dish washer with the plan of running it at a later date when the dishwasher is full I come home to find the dishes put away. It’s unclear whether the cleaning staff is washing the dishes by hand and putting them away, or if they are putting away my dirty dishes. Needless to say I have made it a habit to run the dish washer the night before cleaning days.

-Every time I come home after a cleaning day my toiletries are always re-arranged in a new and unique way, it’s amazing how many places my razor has ended up.

-Since the cleaning ladies have keys to my place they bring things into my place and put them where they think they should belong. So when I send my dry cleaning out, my laundry comes back and the cleaning ladies hang everything in my closet where they think it belongs. And when I get Fedex documents, faxes or large mail they put them in random places in my apartment.

2006-08-01T21:40:00.000+09:00

Me and The Japanese High School Kid

A really random thing happened on the way home from work a night or two ago. I was walking down the street when a Japanese high school kid frantically waved me down and in broken English asked if he could take my photo for his school photo project. I said yes, so for all I know somewhere in a Tokyo area high school my photo is displayed on a wall, probably with a caption like “behold the red headed giant”

2006-07-30T00:31:00.000+09:00

Really unexpected, really intense culture shock

Even before I left Tokyo for my weekend in the US I was expecting to run into some amount of culture shock, but I have to admit I was totally un-prepared for the amount of reverse culture shock that hit me when I got to the US. Coming back from India and Africa earlier this year was pretty tough, after only two weeks in both places it was a shock to come off the plane and see clean streets, drinkable water and “normal” life.

Coming back from Japan after five weeks was like returning from Mars, the reverse culture shock was unreal. After five weeks here, I got off the plane in New York and the first thing that shocked me was the blue sky, it's been rainy season here for my five week stint and it wasn't until I was standing under a blue sky that it hit me like a lightning bolt that I hadn't seen a blue sky since mid June. I can’t describe how much the blue sky bothered me, which sounds so odd, and really is odd.

I was also shocked to see tall people and the mix of non-Japanese people that you would expect to see in New York. I guess I didn’t fully appreciated how much of a melting pot New York is until I spent time in Japan where the majority of people are Japanese and thus there isn’t all that much diversity. The diversity of people in the US really jumped out in a way that it never has before, it made me appreciate the New York area a lot.

As many of my friends and family know, I like to eat, and because I am tall I eat a lot. That’s been a challenge here in Tokyo where the portions are small, so in Japan I am often hungry. I was shocked to discover that in only five weeks in Japan my stomach had adjusted to Japanese portions and I was literally unable to eat meals that I would have considered normal in the past.

By far the hardest culture shock was my first night home, I had been sleeping on hard Japanese beds so long that my own bed felt foreign and my clothes smelled odd because they didn't have Japanese detergents in them.

By far the highlight of the night however was when I almost got arrested at 4AM. Little did I know that earlier that week a storm had caused a mini-tornado that passed through the park in my neighborhood in New Jersey and made a mess of the park. Long story short, I couldn't sleep due to the time difference so at 4AM I went for a walk in the park, but it turns out the park was closed due to the storm damage (which I didn't know) and a sheriff confronted me and was really nasty, he made a lot of threats, didn't really believe me when I said I had just come from Tokyo, threatened to arrest me and then drove his SUV on the sidewalk three feet behind me for several hundred yards while I walked out of the park.

Besides the first night and the culture shock of the first day or so, the time at home was amazing, but I have to say that in some ways it was nice to come “home” to Tokyo to what I now consider “normal”. That is such an odd thing to say…..

2006-07-27T18:51:00.000+09:00

I’m back

I’m back in Tokyo after an amazing and yet very insane weekend trip back to the US. I left Tokyo last Thursday morning, all told the trip to the US involved a subway ride, a 2 hour bus ride, a 2 hour wait in the airport, a 13 hour plane flight and then another 1.5 hours in a taxi from JFK. It was a lot of travel and that was only the beginning, while in the US I drove a couple more hours to get to my friends wedding. And then of course coming back to Tokyo I did the whole thing over again, except that the flight is even longer (14 hours) coming back to Tokyo because of the winds. The really crazy thing about the flight back was that due to weather we flew REALLY far north. We were literally over the artic ocean north of Alaska, we didn’t even turn south until we were pretty deep into Siberia.

Despite traveling more than 40 hours to spend a little over four days in the US the trip was really worth it. I had a great chance to see a bunch of my friends and it was nice to be able to be home after five weeks even with the culture shock, more on that soon.

2006-07-19T23:09:00.000+09:00

Insane Travel Weekend

I am leaving tomorrow for what is shaping up to be an insane travel weekend. I am returning to the US for a friends wedding. All told I will be traveling 30+ hours and spending only four days in the US, it’s gonna be insane, but I am looking forward to going back home and experiencing normal life again.

2006-07-19T23:03:00.000+09:00

Tokyo Streets and Alley’s

Here’s a few random photo’s I took on the street here in Tokyo, nothing special about the street or the alley, I just like the way they turned out so I figured I would post them (Click on the image to see full size):

2006-07-19T22:54:00.000+09:00

Tokyo Tower

One of the random things I did not know about until I got here is that the Japanese decided to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the 1950’s. They call it Tokyo Tower and it’s actually fairly close to my apartment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Tower

I have a great view of the tower from the living room in my apartment, it’s especially cool looking on cloudy nights, which since it’s rainy season has been almost every night I’ve been here.

Here’s what it looks like at night from my apartment (click on the image to see a bigger version):

This is what it looks like from my place during the day, it's not quite as cool:

I actually jog to the tower fairly often and jog around the base of the tower. I haven’t yet taken the time to go inside to see the attractions at the base of tower or up the tower, I’m waiting for clear weather which still seems to be months away. The Japanese have a habit of mixing odd things together, which in the case of the tower means that there is a bizarre facility directly under the tower with an aquarium, a wax museum, an art gallery and something called the “Mysterious Walking Zone”.

The other thing that is a little odd is that unlike the real Eiffel Tower, the Tokyo Tower is painted orange and white for airplane safety which doesn’t make it quite as aesthetically pleasing. I recently took my camera when I passed through the area, here’s what the tower looks like up close and personal:

2006-07-17T15:28:00.000+09:00

TV Remote

I have to say I am constantly amazed by the cool high tech gadgets here in Japan, just take a look at the remote for the TV in my apartment. It’s see through, the numbers are stickers on glass and there are no buttons. I can only assume that it is working off infrared via the outer edges which are plastic, but it’s pretty cool:

Front (click on the image to see it in more detail):

Back:

Front Again:

2006-07-16T10:26:00.000+09:00

Squid with Innards Wrapped in Foil

I am generally willing to try all the Japanese foods over here at least once, so I have eaten plenty of raw fish, octopus, squid and other things that don’t always look or sound appetizing. I generally find that most things here are pretty good. Occasionally I see things or taste things that I just can’t stomach.

For instance I was walking around the other day and I saw a sign in front of a restaurant that said in English that the special of the day was “Squid with Innards Wrapped in Foil”. I’m fine with the squid, but innards in foil? No thanks.

2006-07-16T10:24:00.000+09:00

Pirates in Tokyo

I was walking to work on Monday the 10th and I was really surprised to come across a construction crew building a pirate ship. That definitely stopped me in my tracks, I mean it’s not everyday that you come across a pirate ship in the middle of Tokyo. It turned out it was being built for the Tokyo premiere of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”, later in the day I went back down to the theater to take another look and the red carpet was all set up and a huge crowd of fans were all over the place. Apparently Johnny Depp and all the other stars later came and walked down the red carpet, by the time that happened there were so many fans around that you couldn’t even come near any of this, here’s what the set up for the premiere looked like:

The Pirate Ship (click on the images to see larger versions):

The Red Carpet:

More Pirate Ship:

2006-07-16T10:16:00.000+09:00

The Tanabata Festival 7/7/06

Earlier this month Japan celebrated Tanabata, a festival that happens on 7/7 of the lunar month. Wikipedia explains the festival here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanabata. One of the cool and interesting ways that Tanabata is celebrated is by writing wishes on decorative pieces of paper and hanging them from Bamboo, not all the decorations hung on the bamboo have wishes but most of them do. When I visited the Senso-JI temple it was during the lead up to Tanabata so I saw this Tanabata bamboo in one area of the temple:

The bamboo with decorations and wishes for Tanabata was not restricted to temples, for about a week before the night of 7/7 bamboo was (most of it cut ie not living) was placed all over Tokyo (and the rest of Japan) for people to hang wishes and decorations from, my apartment building had a bamboo shoot, as did my office, even my underground subway station had the bamboo shoot shown below, it made Tokyo look very festive to see all this throughout the city:

2006-07-13T23:37:00.000+09:00

One Month

Today marks the one month point for my stay here in Tokyo. I recently found out that I will be staying here longer than originally planned, it is looking like I will be here until at least the middle of the fall. So, for those of you considering visiting, it looks like there will be ample opportunity to come share in my Tokyo adventure, so come on down.

2006-07-13T23:33:00.000+09:00

Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa

A week ago Sunday I visited Senso-ji Temple in the Asakusa area of Tokyo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senso-ji). The temple and grounds are very beautiful as you can see from the photos below (as always please click on the image to view a bigger copy):

Unfortunately Thunder Gate which can be seen in wikipedia is currently under going some sort of work, it’s covered by a white shroud for painting or restoration? So, I didn’t get to see it, if you would like to see the full set of photo’s I took at the temple please click here http://www.flickr.com/photos/rrbhs99/sets/72157594184532446/

Thunder gate would be visible at the other end of this crowd, but it is covered in white as you can barely see:

2006-07-13T23:22:00.000+09:00

Waiting for Mt. Fuji

I finally saw Mt. Fuji for the first time the other day, I had been waiting for more than three weeks to see it despite the fact that it should be plainly visible from where I live and work. Because its rainy season here it has always been cloud and hazy since I got here. I have to admit that my view of Mt. Fuji only lasted about 20 seconds when the clouds parted and it was so hazy that I mostly got an idea of what it looks like. I didn’t even bother to try taking a photo due to the haze.

UPDATE: I had a fairly clear view of the top 20% of Mt. Fuji earlier today, so maybe I will have to see the mountain in pieces. The locals have been telling me that I should have a great view of the mountain in November, I’m kind of hoping I don’t have to wait that long.

2006-07-13T07:59:00.000+09:00

Life with Gas

Pretty often on the streets of Tokyo you see Japanese advertising that has literal translations of Japanese to English, a lot of them are pretty funny. One of the funniest that I see on a regular basis is for a business in my neighborhood that I jog past when I run in the evenings that has this ad (click on the image to see a larger version which will make it easier to read):

The guy on the couch is what really kills me. I always laugh when I pass that place, I’m sure the locals on the street must thing I am nuts, from their point of view they just see me running down the street and all of the sudden I start laughing for what must appear to them to be absolutely no reason.

The ad has a whole series of cartoons that show why life with gas is good, clearly they mean life with natural gas in the home is good, but if you take it to have the other meaning most of these cartoons are pretty funny

Here’s the rest of the “Life with Gas” ads:

2006-07-05T08:18:00.000+09:00

Tokyo’s Narrow Streets, Short People and My Lunch

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to wake up in a land full of little people who put octopus and squid in your lunch? No? Neither did I, but that pretty much sums up my life at this point. There was definitely a lot of squid and octopus in my lunch yesterday, I wasn’t expecting that but it wasn’t all that bad either.

As for the short people, my family and friends know I’m pretty tall and as anyone who’s been to Japan knows a lot of the people here are not all that tall. So my view when I walk down the street tends to be something like the photo below, notice the photo looks like it was taken above the crowd, that’s my normal view on the street:

One of the charming things about walking around Tokyo is that it’s got tons of side streets and alleys, and often if you walk down the alley you’ll discover that there are even more alleys and side streets jutting off the first alley. Often there’s little restaurants and shops hidden in the maze of side streets, here’s what a couple of the side streets look like:

2006-07-05T08:04:00.000+09:00

Robot Man:

On the way back to my subway train from the park I ran into this guy, randomly enough, he's inside a three legged robot on wheels as some sort of promotion for a department store, I'll let the photo's and the video speak for themselves.

Sorry that the video is sideways, it’s a pain to rotate videos, so all I can recommend is turning your laptop on its side or if you have a desktop try pulling some funky Yoga to look at the monitor sideways:

2006-07-05T08:00:00.000+09:00

A Song and Dance Saturday in Tokyo (Part 2)

After the parade I decided to go to Shibuya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya), which is a very trendy area of Tokyo to explore. Shibuya Crossing, the main intersection outside the train station is very famous for the extremely intense crowds. When you see videos on TV of huge numbers of Japanese people crossing the street in huge numbers going every which way chances are that you are seeing Shibuya Crossing. I took a video of Shibuya Crossing again sorry that part of it is sideways:

I eventually continued on to Yoyogi Park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyogi_Park), which is where the singing and dancing fun continued. First I ran into a group of people in a drum circle, so I guess drum circles in major parks aren't just restricted to Central Park in New York, nor are they restricted to the tarmac of third world airports (more on that one when I get my Africa trip written up).

Things got more interesting as I continued on through the park, first I ran into the group shown in these video:

They had basically set up a DJ on the sidewalk at the edge of the park and they were having a mini rave. Some of the people there were sketchy and clearly had some good drugs in them, so I didn't spend too much time taking video.

I wandered on and saw the highlight of the day, this guy:

He was a DJ, dancer and painter all in one. I won't even try to describe him, just watch the video, it's long but really really worth it, the one thing I will say is that the reason he dances off to the right from time to time is that he is dancing over to the woman in the audience he's painting. The other really interesting and random thing is that he wasn’t accepting money for his paintings, only food and drinks that the audience (25+ people) were buying him from street vendors in the park.

2006-07-05T00:32:00.000+09:00

A Song and Dance Saturday in Tokyo (Part 1)

I had just finished up my Saturday afternoon Japanese tutoring lesson and was sitting in my apartment trying to decide where in Tokyo I should go explore when I heard what I thought was a marching band coming down my street. I have to admit at first I thought it had to be a neighbor playing music really loud, but it got loud enough that it was clear it was a real live marching band. So, I stepped out on my balcony and I was surprised to see a police excort leading a convertible with a few VIP's followed by a marching band from the Japanese Defense Forces (the army). I put the video on YouTube:

What made it more odd was that the parade continued with a group of 10 year old girls twirling battons, a high school marching band, some middle aged women dressed in traditional garb pounding on drums, a little league team, some random people and finally a third marching band.

Needless to say I grabbed my digital camera and took some video, and as soon as the group passed my apartment I threw on my shoes and went down to the street to follow the group. If you look at the video you'll notice that I wasn't the only one who was surprised by the parade, for the most part everyone on the street was going about their business and ignoring the parade. I followed the parade four blocks where it came to a major intersection, the parade was split in half by a red light, I was with the back half of the parade. It was clear that the parade was ending in a little park on the far side of the street and I kid you not in a great example of Japanese efficiency by the time the light was changed the army band had already loaded their instruments and left, they weren't even there when I got to that side of the street. The rest of the groups did pretty much the same thing they took a group picture and then either walked straight into the subway station or got onto busses and left, the whole parade was gone in less than five minutes.

I asked a local why on earth there was a parade and she told me they had a "cheerleader gathering", though we had some trouble communicating because of the language barrier it was clear that she meant that the neighborhood was having a civic pride day. They had met at Roppongi Hills, which is about 10 mins up the street and paraded down the street, so all told the parade lasted 15 to 20 minutes, 25 mins tops.

How do you show your civic pride in Japan? Well you gather everything you have to be proud of, so you start with this elderly gentleman he’s somehow important

You grab this guy who apparently won a silver medal at Athens in 2004 (The elderly gentleman and the Olympian where in the VIP car)

Throw in a little league team

some baton twirling 10 year olds

a few marching bands,

And some random people, and BAM you've got a parade!!! You have to love this place:

2006-07-05T00:22:00.000+09:00

Language Classes and What They're For

This past week I started taking language classes from a private tutor who was recommended by a friend who lived here for a few years. The instructor is great, I'm hoping to pick up some basic conversational Japanese, I have no illusions about learning the written language here I just want to learn enough to get by in day to day interactions.

I'm hoping that the language classes will help lower the cultural barrier, just tonight I had one of the experiences that wasn't so nice. As has happened before, the restaurant I picked for dinner had no English menus, no photo menus and no English speaking staff. To make it even worse, the table was so short I couldn't fit my legs under the table without stretching my legs out in front of me. I don't really find eating alone at restaurants all that entertaining no matter what, under those circumstances where I had to order a random item, which in this case wasn't all that tasty, and was too small to really feed me, it makes for a downright depressing way to end a day after 11+ hours in the office. It's that sort of thing that gives me pause before I agree to stick around six months. This is the sort of experience I wish I could share with all the people who tell me how moving to Tokyo is an Amazing opportunity, while it is, it can also be pretty unpleasant. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining about being over here, I'm just illustrating the day to day challenges that can make life here pretty tough.

2006-07-05T00:20:00.000+09:00

My Mailman, My Pimp?

I just checked my mailbox for my apartment here in Japan for the first time, it was all junk mail except for one random photocopy of a photo of a beautiful topless blond white woman with a phone number. I either managed to pick up an incredibly beautiful woman without meeting her, in which case I have skills I never knew I had, or there is a shaddy mail based pimp in my neighborhood. The odd thing is that the mail box requires a key to access it, so theoretically the mailman and I are the only people who can get into the box, so I guess that means my mailman is also a pimp?

2006-07-05T00:17:00.000+09:00

The challenge in finding English Language entertainment:

This past weekend, I decided to see if I could get my hands on a copy of the DVD of Syriana since it just came out on DVD and I've been wanting to see it. First I tried visiting a Japanese movie rental place, which I found mostly carried cartoons that cause children to have seizures and it was clear that without residency papers and a local credit card that I would never be able to set up a rental account. (see my cell phone post)

There is a book store/music store/movie store in the shopping complex attached to our office that caters to expats, so I decided to go there to see if I could buy syriana. First thing I forgot that hollywood doesn't use the same title around the world and second thing I can't read the title anyway because it's often written in Japanese characters. So, I asked a staff member who of course couldn't understand what I was saying so she had me write down "SYRIANA" on a hello kitty note pad that she pulled out of her pocket (it really was hello kitty), and of course Syriana is not the name used for the movie, so we tried talking back and forth until I said it stars George Clooney at which point she said "George Clooney-san!!!!!" and got all excited and pulled up a list of all his movies, and of course the DVD is not out in Japan yet, although Amazon will deliver it here for the small price of 10 billion yen or something like that.

2006-07-05T00:15:00.000+09:00

Vending Machines in Restaurants:

One of the more random things you run into in restaurants here is that there are places where you order your food from a vending machine. You literally put money in the machine, push a button over a picture of the food you'd like and the machine prints a ticket out. You hand the ticket to the server or cook, which in some places is the same person, and they make the food and serve it to you. It's an odd way to handle food, pre-paying a machine, I've bought both lunch and dinner in restaurants this way, I took a camera phone picture of the vending machine at a lunch place:

2006-07-05T00:13:00.000+09:00

Moving Day:

I moved into my apartment on my second Saturday here in Tokyo, it's nice to be out of the hotel. It's nice having a kitchen and being able to unpack, I had been living out of luggage for the last week and a half which gets old fast. I'm now living in Azabujyuban, a nice neighborhood in Tokyo, when I get settled into the apartment I’ll throw some photo’s up on the web.

2006-07-05T00:12:00.000+09:00

Running in the Dark:

I went for a run after work on Thursday night, it was a nice night so I looked up on the map how to run to the Imperial garden perimeter, I got a little lost on the way but eventually got there. I was running the perimeter of the Imperial grounds when I saw the lights on the horizon of what I later learned was Ginza. Ginza is a lot like Times Square in New York, it's full of neon lights, compared to the Imperial Garden area which is very dark at night Ginza looked like the lights of Las Vegas rising out of the desert. Needless to say I was drawn to the lights like a moth to a bug lamp, I ran into Ginza and eventually had to just walk because of the crowds.

Ginza is really cool and has all sorts of side streets and alleys, I wandered into a number of them and eventually it became clear that I didn't know how to get back out of Ginza and to my hotel. The fact that only some of the street signs have English didn't help nor does the way that the city and it's addresses are laid out, I’ll let wikipedia explain the street layout:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

When it came time to run home I only knew the approximate direction I needed to go in so I started running that way, eventually I was able to see the building I work in and it was a long way off. I ran towards it, which was tricky because I often lost sight of it and the streets don't follow a grid here. As I got closer to the building I work in I could see the hotel so I started running towards it, I was approaching the hotel from a direction I had never been in before, that tells you how lost I was. When I was about three blocks from the hotel, I started to run across the street and up a small street when an armed man in a uniform yelled at me and told me to stop, I looked up and realized I was right on the perimeter of the US Embassy and sadly the Embassy has such stringent security you can't even walk on the sidewalk outside. It was a little odd to be turned away from the Embassy of my own country, but you can't argue with a guy who's got a machine gun. So, I detoured and eventually got to the hotel. All told my planned 45 minute run took 3 hours.

2006-07-05T00:08:00.000+09:00

High Tech Lunch

Thursday I went to lunch with a co-worker and it was by far the most high tech lunch I've ever had in my life. We were in a Sushi place where the chefs made a large assortment of options that fly by on a conveyor belt. The Japanese call this sort of sushi restaurant Kaiten Sushi. You take what you would like to eat off the conveyor belt and the pricing is based on the color of the plate. When it came time to get our bill the waiter waved a wand with an electronic eye over the plates we had eaten from, it beeped and said how much we needed to pay. I have no idea how it worked but it was pretty cool.

2006-07-05T00:07:00.000+09:00

More Random Things About Life in Tokyo

I was woken up in my hotel on Tuesday at 6:47AM by an earthquake that measured 4.8 on the Richter scale. I grew up near San Francisco so I'm fairly used to having minor earthquakes on a regular basis, it's almost like a small piece of home. I've been living in the New York area for the last few years, so it's been a while since I experienced an earthquake. A 4.8 is on the larger size of small earthquakes, this one came as a single large jolt, definitely a unique way to wake up in the morning.

The restaurant I went to the night before last for dinner had no English speakers so I ended up ordering at random again, the food was fantastic, the beer on the other hand was some really strange and shitty dark Chinese beer. I've never had dark Chinese beer before and I have to say I will probably try to avoid it in the future.

I went out with co-workers last night and they convinced me to eat octopus, squid and some other uniquely Japanese seafood, I drew the line at sea anemone. Squid (raw) tasted much better than octopus (raw), the food that got me the worst was I went to eat what I thought was beef and it turned out to be liver.

2006-07-05T00:05:00.000+09:00

High Tech Taxi’s

The taxi's in Tokyo are the most high tech cars I have ever been in, they pull up and the driver picks up a remote control (similar to a TV remote), with the press of a button on the remote the passenger door opens. When you get in the driver hits another button and the door closes. I gave the driver the address of the office I needed to go to, he picked up another remote and used it to input the address into the small flat panel display on his dashboard which put up a GPS map that told him how to get where we were headed. At the other end when I gave the driver my credit card he pulled out a cell phone like device and wirelessly took care of the charge. The door then opened via remote control to let me out. I am going to have to figure out a way to get some photo's and video of all this, it's pretty impressive.

2006-07-05T00:03:00.000+09:00

5 Random Funny Things about Tokyo from my first full week:

So during the week I don't have a ton to write about since I avoid discussing work, but here's five random things from the first half and my first full week in Tokyo:

1) The toilet seat in my hotel room has a heater and a lot of electric and moving parts, it definitely scares me because the heater is motion detector based, if I go near the toilet a small electric motor in the toilet starts making noises. I am especially afraid of the toilet because I noticed today that there is a sign in the men's room in the building I work in that says "warn children and the elderly not to sit too long on the toilet as burns can occur." Apparently the toilet seat warmer is a dangerous weapon.

2) I have already been given three pairs of slippers to wear since you aren't supposed to wear shoes in a lot of places, I'm sure there will be a ton more

3) You really have to wonder why CNN Japan switches to CNN in Spanish at 4AM, for those wondering why I know what's on CNN at 4AM, it's all about the jet lag

4) I love in the middle of the day here in Tokyo if I'm reading a website for a US based newspaper, for instance the NYtimes, the day will change in the US and all the content switches to the next edition, this happens about one in the afternoon here. The even stranger thing is that I will go home and come back to work and the US newspapers will still be on the same day.

5) I discovered last night that I have a couple more English language TV channels on my TV, Fox and National Geographic, you have no idea how big that is to me. This literally doubled my TV English language channels. The Japanese channels are entertaining for wackiness but you can't watch them for any real length of time, now I can watch Fox teenage girl drama and Cops. Oddly national geographic randomly switched to Japanese in the middle of a show about piranha’s the narration swapped to Japanese while the piranha’s were eating a bird, not sure why that was. But I guess if CNN can be in Spanish, then piranha’s eating birds can be in Japanese.

2006-07-04T23:57:00.000+09:00

A Rainy Sunday in Tokyo

My first Sunday in Tokyo was rainy like pretty much every other day I've had here. Unfortunately it's rainy season here and will be for at least a month. So, I went out exploring and looked for things I could do while staying dry. Before I get into the day’s adventures, I had to share a story from breakfast this morning that perfectly illustrates all the small cultural and language challenges built into day to day life. I found this bakery in the neighborhood near my hotel so I ordered some breakfast pastries, the place had a café as part of the bakery. I was planning to take my order and sit in the café while I ate my breakfast. But I grabbed a bottle of water from a cooler in the café while waiting for my pastries from the guy behind the counter. The moment I did the guy behind the counter started packaging my food to go. I asked him what the deal was and he told me bottled water was only for "outside food" and that since I had taken a bottle I had to take my food to go, he was resolute, so I took my food to go.

Once I'd finished eating my breakfast outside, I decided to go out and explore, I first found my way to the Imperial Gardens, and spent some time touring the part that's open to the public. Sorry I don't have any photos, the weather was pretty dark so I decided to wait for a sunny day to go back and take photos. It eventually got pretty rainy, so I decided to see what I could do that wouldn't involve going outside.

I couldn't find much entertaining indoors so eventually out of curiosity I decided to take one of the subway lines all the way to the end just to see what outer Tokyo looked like. It was a pretty long ride, so I passed the time by reading a book, when I got to the end I was definitely in the suburbs of Tokyo. I walked out of the train station, the end point of the subway intersected with a longer distance railroad, and saw that there was a huge Pachinko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko) parlor right across the street.

I walked into the Pachinko joint just to see what it was like, first thing there was literally about 110 decibels of noise in there and second there was like 200 Japanese men in a smoke filled room in a trance staring at the balls moving through the machine, it was about as depressing to look at as the Atlantic City slots old people section. I took a few photo's of the parlor and the goods you can win using my camera phone, sorry for the low quality but my AMAZING YELLOW PHONE doesn’t have a great camera (see my earlier post on the phone).

I wandered out of the Pachinko place, mostly to save my hearing and walked around the neighborhood in the rain. My main comment about greater Tokyo is that there are a lot of people crammed into not a lot of space. Eventually I decided to get out of the weather so first I walked through a super market, I always make it a point to visit super markets in every country I visit, looking at the food people eat and the household products they use is an amazing way to learn about a country, its people and its culture. The Japanese store was pretty cool, there was definitely eel, octopus, squid and other uniquely Japanese food in the store, as for the packaged goods I couldn’t read the labels on almost everything so it was tough to figure out was some things were.

I decided to wander around the neighborhood some more and look for a place to grab food. I eventually walked into a restaurant and ran into a problem that happens here fairly often, no one there spoke English and they didn't have an English menu or a picture menu. So, I literally ordered at random, I just pointed my finger at the menu and hoped for the best. This was made even more entertaining because my waiter was oddly wearing a baseball uniform, the place was not baseball themed, there were no sports posters, paraphernalia or TV's in the place. It was a normal small restaurant, and all the waiters except for mine were in normal clothing. The guy acted totally normal and was normal in all respects except for the baseball uniform. I almost couldn't keep a straight face in talking to the guy, not that we spoke each other's language so I suppose it didn't really matter. I ended up with some pretty tasty chicken so I can't complain, but I will always wonder why the guy was in a baseball uniform.

It was still raining when I finished lunch so I decided to walk back to the train station to head back to the hotel. On the way to the station I walked into a Portuguese wine shop (no idea why Portugal since it was run by an old Japanese couple) to get a bottle of wine, I figured I would get some wine to drink in my hotel this evening while I ponder why the guy who brought me lunch was wearing a baseball uniform. I think that's how alcoholism starts, but hey I have nothing better to do on a rainy Sunday evening in this place.

2006-07-04T23:42:00.000+09:00

Apartment Hunting:

I spent part of my first weekend hunting for an apartment, my employer arranged for a real estate agent who did most of the leg work, my main comment is that Tokyo apartments are very small. I ended up touring three apartments:

Apartment option one is the apartment I will be moving into, more on that apartment in a later post. For now I wanted to use the other two as examples of how small the apartments here are.

Here's apartment number two (about 35 square meters), on the upside it has a deck with the view you can see in the pics, it's not a bad view of the neighborhood and skyline.

Unfortunately that's about the only good thing about this apartment. It's all one room (the two photos below are showing the entire apartment), with the closet in the living room, the bed is next to a desk, across from the one sitting chair and the kitchen (very small) is on one of the walls of the room. The entry way has three break off rooms for the bathroom, shower and sink/laundry (all the apartments have a combined washer and dryer, European style where it's the same thing not two units). There's no couch or table, and the TV has to be watched while sitting on the bed. This place seems very small to say the least.

Here’s apartment number three (a little less than 35 square meters), on the upside it’s in one of the trendiest new buildings in the city and it’s less than 100 yards from my work. On the downside it too is very small, as you can see in this photo it is made up of a long entry hallway and one room, that’s the entire apartment you are looking at there:

The idea of having the bed take up most of the main room is a bit odd and again shows how small the place is:

Besides the bed, there is one chair:

A hallway which sadly takes up half of the square footage of the place:

A tiny kitchen

And a TV, Fax Machine and desk conveniently less than a foot from bed, how efficient!!!! How tiny!!!!:

2006-07-04T22:25:00.000+09:00

The Adventures of my first weekend:

Before I left for Tokyo literally everyone I talked to about the impending move told me to watch "Lost in Translation". Like a lot of things I didn't have time to see the movie before I came over, so I bought the DVD on my second to last day in the US and packed it. I watched it on my laptop this morning (my first Saturday) in my hotel and little did I know that I would he having a live action version of some of the cultural confusion shown in the movie.

After watching the movie, I decided to get a cell phone, so I went to NTT Docomo first since it's their national carrier. No one in the store spoke English, so the women called a hotline and had the operator serve as a translator as we handed the phone back and forth. We finally got to a question about whether I am a registered resident alien, which the answer is no, I don't have a visa, work permit or registration since I don't need any of that for the first 90 days here. Because I am not registered I am basically viewed as an illegal immigrant so NTT Docomo told me they couldn't serve me.

They recommended that I go to Vodafone, and even offered to have an employee walk me down the street to their location. I had seen where it was so I turned them down. About 20 employees bowed and thanked me profusely, they were thanking me and yet refusing to serve me. So, I walked into Vodafone, and like NTT Docomo they had an incredible assortment of 100+ cell phones all really really high tech. Even before I got to Japan I was looking forward to getting a cell phone here just so I could get a super high tech phone from the land of the robot dogs. I took it as a good sign that there was a robot directing traffic around a construction site outside Vodafone (see the pics of the robot to the left and below and note the real person next to the robot dressed almost identical to the robot).

I talked to the vodafone employees and I told them I would like a phone that has internet access and voicemail, they also asked me if I am a registered alien (thankfully they spoke English). When I said no, they told me I could only have one of two phones and that I had to use a prepaid phone. My choices were a phone with so few features it might not actually work as a phone, or the one I ended up with, a bright canary yellow phone (see pic to the left). I asked if it had internet access and they said they couldn't give me internet access because I am an unregistered alien. I asked about voicemail, and again they couldn't give it to me due to my lack of papers. No joke, my cell phone has a built in 90 second digital answering machine to capture messages because I can't have real voicemail since I am undocumented. I have no idea why I need papers to get voicemail and internet access. The only redeeming qualities about the phone is that it has a camera phone and that they were able to activate a service they call "Long Mail" which allows emails and text messages that are 6,000 characters rather than the usual 160. The funniest thing is that I tested the built in voice recorder thing, and it turns out that the way it works is that the phone answers itself and the microphone records the person leaving the message from the normal ear speaker (the phone's a clam shell), so apparently if I miss a call and the phone isn't folded shut I won't get voicemail. I can't figure out how to erase the message so it appears that once I have gotten 90 seconds worth of messages that I will just have to go without voicemail. This place is so wacky.

2006-07-04T22:18:00.000+09:00

The First Few Days

Not too much exciting has happened in my first few days here in Tokyo, because of the jet lag I am in the bit of a stupor most of the time, so basically my life for these last few days has been nothing but going to work, coming back to the hotel and passing out around 7 or 8 PM. The unfortunate side effect of is waking up about 4 or 5AM, which is great if you want to talk on the phone with someone in the US but not so great if you plan to actually be awake during Tokyo business hours. So, I've been working on going to bed one hour later a day and waking up one hour later a day, hopefully soon I'll be sleeping during a normal time frame.

Unfortunately I learned that June is rainy season here in Tokyo, so it's rained basically everyday I've been here and the forecast calls for rain everyday for the next ten days, when it isn't raining it's hot and very humid. As you can see from the view out my hotel room window it’s pretty hazy, and this is the clearest it’s been so far.

Needless to say I haven't done much exploring given the weather and my zombie like state. Sadly I've even resorted to using room service for about half my dinners, the other half have been at restaurants on a direct line between my office and hotel. I normally avoid room service like the plague, the food is generally terrible, the prices really high and it's such a waste of a chance to try new foods in a new city, but when you are falling asleep standing up at 5PM room service is a great thing.

2006-07-04T22:01:00.000+09:00

The Beginning:

I moved to Tokyo, Japan from New York in mid June, I left JFK the morning of the 13th and compliments of the date line arrived the afternoon of the 14th. Thankfully I am not superstitious, I am sure there are a lot of people who would not want to start a multi-month relocation on the 13th. I was moved over here for work for three to six months, and I have to say that the time frame leading up to the move made the actual relocation a little like getting fired out of a cannon.

In less than three months prior to my move to Tokyo I broke up with my long time Girlfriend, went through a car accident that gave me a nice beating, spent half a month in Africa where I had a really intense experience (more on that soon), partially moved out of my place in the New York area so that I didn't really have a "home" (I am flying back to finish the move sometime in the next month or two), went through a major change in roles with a volunteer organization I work with and a whole host of other things. Basically, I went through such an intense period leading up to Tokyo that I had zero time to prepare, or even think about the trip in advance.

So, I packed the day before, called a cab and went to JFK with four big bags and two backpacks not really knowing what I was getting myself into.

I have never been to Japan before, the closest I've been prior to now was Australia and India, neither of which has anything in common with Japan. But, hey why not see a place for the first time when you're moving there right? Needless to say my general feeling as I boarded the plane at JFK was here goes nothing.

The flight over was great, my employer put me in business class which is always nice, the service on JAL was fantastic and we had a great view of some mountains and amazing glaciers in Alaska. I realized shortly after boarding the plane that I had packed so quickly that I hadn't even had the time to write down the address and phone number of my hotel, all I had was the name which was the ANA hotel Tokyo. At the time I didn't really have a great idea about how I would manage to get into the city of Tokyo (the airport is 1.5 hrs outside the city), let alone how I would find the hotel. But there wasn't much I could do about it from 35,000 feet over Canada so I just decided I would figure it out when we arrived.

When I got into Narita (the international airport for Tokyo), I was a little unsure of how I would be able to manage with all my bags. I normally try to travel light but given that I was moving to the far side of the world for potentially half a year, and that I had packed in only one day I ended up with four checked bags some of which weighed a lot. Thankfully I was able to get everything onto a free luggage cart and the only minor trouble I ran into was that Japanese Customs asked me a few questions about whether I was importing goods or smuggling anything. When I told them I was moving here for work and mentioned my employer's name they took my word at face value and let me go (for the record no I am not a smuggler).

The moment I cleared customs I started the adventure of finding a way into the city and to my hotel. My first run in with the impossibility of communicating through the language barrier came when I converted currency at the airport currency exchange (I normally get currency in the US before traveling but again due to the last minute nature of my preparations I just brought whatever dollars I had on me when I left the country). Let's just say in a preview of what would become a major challenge in my day to day life here in Tokyo I wasn't able to understand anything of what the currency guy was saying and he didn't understand me. Thankfully he was still able to get the exchange taken care of.

With the money challenge taken care of I went in search of a route into the city. To explain the challenge, in Tokyo unlike in most other business destinations Taxis are out of the question to get into the city from the airport. The airport is a long way, an hour and a half by car, from the city so it's several hundred dollars for a taxi. I first tried walking over to the ANA airline ticket counter seeing as how I was trying to get to their hotel, but no one was there. So, I tried the airport information desk thankfully they were able to point me to a bus company. The bus company rep knew just enough English to sell me a ticket and send me to a bus gate at the airport.

I found the gate and was confused to discover that buses pull up to and leave the gate about once every two minutes and each new bus was headed to a different location. The bus company luggage handlers looked at my ticket and told me to stay off to the side for the next 10 mins or so, we couldn't communicate any further so I took their word and waited off to the side. Thankfully my bus came and the bus company checked my luggage on the bus which saved my back from the pain of moving all my stuff.

By this point I had been awake for more than 20 hours, I woke up very early in New Jersey to have enough time to get to JFK via taxi, complements of my packing the day before I had only slept about 3 hours the night before the flight. Needless to say even with a little sleep on the plane I was in a stupor. So, while maybe I should have been having some deep thoughts about arriving in my new temporary home all I could think while looking out the window during the bus ride was "Wow this place looks really Japanese". Deep I know.

As the ride into the city continued I started to drift off to sleep, as I was looking out the window in a haze of fatigue I saw something that made me think that I might be having fatigue induced hallucinations, I literally saw the Matterhorn and Cinderella's castle. Thankfully I wasn't that out of it, it was just Tokyo Disneyland. A very odd thing to see in the middle of Japan, but it was the first of many odd, entertaining and confusing things I would see in the coming weeks, more on that soon.