Epilogue

Now that it's months later and I still haven't finished writing up my stories, I've been bitten by the writing bug (that and I'm at work with nothing else to do). I should probably start by saying that I will now forever be one of those people who constantly refer to that time they lived abroad. I've noticed myself doing it a lot even all these months later. I complain about Chinese chopsticks not being as good as Japanese ones and I mention how good different foods were when I had them IN Japan. I'm not proud of this situation and I'll work to remedy it. At least I've recognized that I have a problem.

In my return home, I was again struck by something that happens every time I travel. I marveled at how many miles I had traveled only to end up right where I had started. Back home in Philadelphia, in my room. I traveled halfway around the world to end up in a place that not many people have been, somewhere that I feel completely secure and comfortable. I get this feeling every time I return home after a trip. It's compounded by the fact that travel can be done so fast now. You can cover thousands of miles in a mindbogglingly short amount of time, for relatively little money. (Now I realize it's not a trivial amount of money, but considering how much it costs in the grand scheme of things, air travel is a bargain.)

I think what hit me more this time than in past trips, was the fact that someone else would soon occupy my apartment and there would be another new face in the neighborhood. The cashiers at the Papasu Pharmacy would start seeing a new regular, the folks at Sakiya would have a new customer, basically life would proceed exactly the same in Komagome whether I was there or not. So while feeling that geographically the world has become very small, I simultaneously felt that I had been scaled down with the world and was now also very small. I'm accustomed to living in a world with my friends and classmates where I can go different places and run into people I know. But now I see that I had left a neighborhood I had lived in for 2 months and my departure didn't matter in the slightest. I'm not trying to imply that I had expected or should expect that my presence would fundamentally impact Tokyo, but that doesn't mean I can't feel small at realizing that I had no impact.

There's probably a lot more I could say about this, but I probably would make it all up to make myself sound smarter than I am or something. Japan is awesome and my appreciation for it has grown since I got back.

Tsukiji Market

One of the famous tourist stops in Tokyo is Tsukiji fish market. It's the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. It basically supplies the 30+ million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area with food. The main attractions for tourists are the tuna auction and sushi breakfast. The tuna auction got so popular that they actually had to set up areas for tourists to watch from because it was affecting business having tourists standing around everywhere.

The main problem with the market is getting there. Work begins at the market in the early hours of the morning, but the trains don't start running until much later. This poses the problem of how to get there early enough to see the real action. The tuna auction is open to tourists between 5 and 6:30 am. So you pretty much have to get there in that time frame. The subways to the Tsukiji stop only start running a bit after 5 am.

We met up at 5 am at Akihabara so we could take the Hibiya line down to Tsukiji. I got on the Yamanote line at 4:30 am. I actually got to the station just as it was opening. Not surprisingly, it was pretty empty. As it turned out, no matter what method of getting to Akihabara i thought of, they all involved me leaving my apartment at the same time. I thought of riding my bike to Akihabara, but that would take about an hour. I thought of walking to Tabata and getting a different train, but the added time walking just negated any other benefits.

By a stroke of luck, Steve and Matteo ended up getting on the train in the same car as me at Uguisudani. That might have saved a bit of trouble locating them at Akihabara, but it was completely empty at that time of day. We had planned on meeting at the Shouwa Dori exit, so when we got there we just waited around for Laura and Rob to show up. Once we all assembled and I introduced everyone to Rob, we headed to the subway and to Tsukiji.

In Tsukiji we had a mild idea of where the market was. Laura, Steve, Matteo and I had seen it from our cruise down the Sumida river. Other than that we weren't sure, but not too concerned. When we got there we actually just followed some signs. At one point, we decided to just turn down a side street and figured we were close enough that as long as we walked along the river we'd find the market.

We walked down the side street and soon realized that we had in fact found the market. We were dodging scores of motorized carts whose drivers were really skilled at maneuvering them, but were also not going to slow down for us. Rob pointed out that it felt a bit like Frogger. We kept walking around and saw some of the sushi restaurants that you can get breakfast at. We noted the location and kept going. We eventually found a couple other tourists who had a map of the market and got a bit better oriented. From their map we saw that we just needed to start walking down the rows and rows of stands, because the market isn't very orderly. You sort of just walk in and wander around. If it seems like you shouldn't go somewhere, that's actually where you should be walking. If you start going somewhere you shouldn't, someone will stop you.

So we had found the market and started actually seeing fish in various states of being alive. There were also tons of clams, mussels, conches, and abalone. They have band saws for cutting the fish down and some 5ft knives for it as well. Most of the fish comes in to the market frozen directly from ships.
We still hadn't found the tuna auction though. We went to where we thought it was, but only saw a door that said "Authorized Personnel Only." So we headed outside to get our bearing again. We found another guy with a map, but this time a guy who worked at the market came up and asked us where we wanted to go. He just took us there and pointed the way. Apparently, we were supposed to go through that door, because you ARE allowed in between 5 and 6:30 am.

The auction was almost over by the time we got there, but it was still interesting. I took a video of one of the auctioneers because he was so animated. Since the auction was winding down we decided to walk around the market some more and to get some breakfast. It probably took us another half hour to wind our way out of the market, all the while dodging the motorized carts.
We got back to where we had seen the restaurants and the one that had had a line outside when we walked by earlier, still had a line out front. We couldn't really tell why there was a line, since all the restaurants looked the same. I just looked on Wikitravel, which said that a few restaurants make it a point to only serve fish that has never been frozen. From what I could tell, the fish next door that had been frozen were still delicious. We ate and left and there was still a line at the place next door.

On my way back home, I passed through Akihabara station. I was pleased to see that the giant line of people waiting to get to the Yamanote line platform weren't heading my way. They were heading towards Tokyo and their 6 days-a-week, stressful day jobs.

Dinner last night

Towhata-sensei took us visitors out to dinner last night to a very small out-of-the way restaurant. I think he wanted to get us all together before we leave and while he was actually in Japan. He's probably one of the busiest people I've ever met, but also one of the nicest. He's one of the top earthquake engineers in Asia, if not the world, and he still manages to impress you with how down to earth he is. Topics at dinner last night ranged from the resignation of the Japanese prime minister to his favorite cartoons. He's apparently a big Flintstones and Looney Toons fan. Looney Toons was a good segue into classic music. He explained that he knew the entire William Tell overture by the age of five from watching Road Runner and Wylie Coyote. When I brought up Spike Jones, the composer, and began humming "The Merry Go Round Brokedown" he picked up humming right where I left off. Also interesting is that he teaches many classes in both Japanese and English, at the same time. He just translates everything as he goes.

Anyway, the point of this blog was to relate a story about his recent trip to Iran. Before going on this trip to Iran for a conference and for a bit of historic earthquake damage sight seeing, he convinced another professor (the one I met at Kyoto University) that he should grow a mustache, because in the Middle East men should have facial hair. This was actually a joke by Towhata-sensei, because these days in Iran there is not much difference if you have a mustache or not.

So on this trip to Iran, they visited Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran. They met with the civil engineering faculty and saw the faculty photos. Apparently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a doctorate in civil engineering and was a professor at the university. His picture is hanging up and beneath it it says "Assistant Professor." So Towhata-sensei asked the department head why they didn't promote Ahmadinejad. After all, he had accomplished so much, he was governor and is now president. The department head's response was that he did not have enough publications.

I found this story really funny and I'm hoping other people will see the same humor in it that I see. Towhata-sensei went further to explain that in Iran many of the well-respected international civil engineering journals are not considered as being rigorous enough in their reviews of papers. Some of these journals are reviewed by people not in the specific field of the paper. No, in Iran they believe that the journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers are the best place to get a paper published, since reviews are done by people in the field of the paper's topic.

Towhata-sensei joked further that maybe ASCE should reject some of Ahmadinejad's papers and send them back as "provisionally accepted" as long as he promises to terminate the nuclear research in Iran.

Wandering

Today, I had very few plans for what I wanted to see and where I wanted to go. I set out for Ikebukuro to return some ping pong balls I had bought to teach the Italians how to play beer pong. We had played and the balls were still in good shape, so I cleaned them and returned them. I had thought that I might want to walk around Ikebukuro a bit or eat lunch there, but once I was done my errand I decided to leave.

The taste of last weekend's döner was still fresh in my mind and the weather was so much clearer today that I decided to give Harajuku another shot. I figured I'd get lunch and see if I could find some cos play people or greasers (there are legit greasers who hang out in Yoyogi park on Sundays).

So I got my döner and headed back to the park. I saw more cos play people than last weekend, but ended up walking into the wrong part of the park. I just kept walking farther into the park and was hoping that I could make a loop back to where I had entered, but alas I never made it back there. No, after entering the park, I embarked on what would be a 3 hour journey walking around Tokyo.

Further into the park, I caught sight of Takashimaya Times Square, a giant building in Shinjuku. Harajuku is just two stops south of Shinjuku, so I figured I'd start heading north again and see where it would take me. I contemplated trying to walk the whole way back to Komagome and probably would have done it if it hadn't started raining around 5 pm.

I set out from the park with a vague idea of where I was headed and set the plan to just walk towards the tall buildings of Shinjuku. The plan ended up being a good one because soon enough I was back near the Krispy Kreme in Shinjuku. Luckily for me there are area maps all over Tokyo near train stations. Once I reached Shinjuku, I reassessed the lay of the land and looked on the map for streets that might lead me home. I saw a few that looked like maybe they would work, but I wasn't sure. Instead, I just started walking towards a river that was on the map.

I wandered through parts of Shinjuku I hadn't seen yet. I saw a bunch of cool sky scrapers and Shinjuku Chuo Park (which is just Shinjuku Central Park, since chuo means central). I saw a bunch of skaters and watched a dude juggle a soccer ball while jumping rope. I was mega impressed. I continued through the park to the river and decided to follow the river since there was a path along either side of it. I followed the river for a few kilometers and checked the maps posted along side the path. I saw that the paths led to Takadanobaba, which I knew was a stop on the Yamanote line. I figured I should head there and then decide where to go.

Along the river path, there were a few public bathrooms. The men's room of one of these bathrooms had completely open urinals. I mean, people walking down the path could look right in on the urinals.

So needless to say, I totally used this urinal and enjoyed the fresh air. I wandered the path and kept going towards Takadanobaba. I relied on the area maps and my sense of direction. In Tokyo you're never too far away from some type of public transportation. A few weeks ago I was able to get the Tokyo subway map onto my iPod, so that was my back up plan. If I got utterly lost, I'd just look for a subway or train station and head back to the nearest large station. It never came to that though.

I made it all the way to Takadanobaba and was prepared to press on, but it started drizzling. I jumped on the JR line and headed home. I took the photo below from Takadanobaba. You can see the cocoon building, which I had walked right by in Shinjuku.

Spanish Restaurant

Laura and I headed out to dinner with Carlos and his friends tonight. All I knew was that we were going to meet near Omote Sando. When I got there I waited with Carlos, Adrianna, and Laura. Eventually their friend Alberto, from Spain, came and we waited for the others to come. We then headed in to the subway station to wait for the remaining members of the party, who included I-chun, Surjith and a Japanese guy I didn't catch the name of. The other guys were all from the chemical engineering department at Todai. I-chun was doing a short post doc at Todai and in January is heading to NYU to do another post doc.

We headed to a Spanish restaurant that Alberto had found and vouched for it being the best Spanish restaurant in Tokyo. He said there were really only about 3, but this was hands down the best.

The owner was a great host and was fluently speaking Spanish with Alberto, Carlos and Adrianna, English with Surjith, Laura and I and Japanese with the last guy. He was from Spain and from the sound of his accent he was from Catalonia (it didn't hurt my detective skills that the restaurant was also called El Catalon or something like that). He had that slight lisp that I know is common in that area of Spain.

The food was great as well. The owner took the time to explain the origins of gazpacho and paella to us. Apparently, the poor make the best gazpacho because they keep it simple. You start with cold water, then you add some tomato and a few other spices, like salt and pepper and that's about it I think. (I'm writing this well after the fact, so my memory is failing me.) He also explained how you make sangria out of cheap wine because the fruit makes it taste better. Then he showed us how to drink out of a wine skin. I almost had a chance to drink out of a wine skin, but I was sitting on the wrong side of the table. I learned that eating rabbit is much more common in Europe than I thought. I had eaten some on Poland and my Polish friend's dad had explained to me how he and his brother had raised them to sell for pocket money when they were young. I'm not sure how easy they were to get in Japan though.

The restaurant itself was also pretty cool. There were messages written all over the walls from people that had been there. The waiters all seemed to be Spanish as well. Sadly, the building was going to be torn down and the restaurant was going to have to move.

The entire night we had been talking about where we lived and it became more necessary when it was time to leave and make our way home. I had been told that I-chun also lived in Komagome, so we started talking about where we live in Komagome. Long story short, we live in the same building. So I had some one to head home with on the last train.

After dinner, Laura, Alberto, I-chun and I headed to Shibuya, which was a short walk away. We were going for a last drink. We tried to go one place, but decided it was too loud to talk. We ended up going in one of many tiny bars in Tokyo. There was room for about 10 people in the entire place, which had 2 floors. These places define "hole in the wall."

We had our drink and just barely made the last trains home.

Last weekend: Sunday

At long last I made it to Harajuku today. Steve, Matteo, Laura and I went to try to find some cos play kids and basically gawk at the freaks. Harajuku is well known as a place young people go on weekends and dress up as comic characters. It was one of last destinations on my list of places in Tokyo to see before I left.

As it turns out though, we picked a bad day to look for cos play kids. It was a bit rainy, but that probably didn't matter too much. Actually, when we got to Harajuku we discovered that there was a giant dance competition called Super Yosakoi. It seemed to be sort of traditional Japanese dances mixed with some more modern stuff.

There were stages all over the place. We'd walk away from one stage and find another. This happened about 5 times. We'd go to leave the stage and see something else and we'd just find a new place where they were dancing. They even had a whole street closed and were dancing up the street following huge trucks with PA systems. On the trucks were members of the dance group who's only job was to sing. The odd thing about these groups was that they all danced up the street to the same song. The people on the trucks all sang their own variation of this song. The majority of the song just consisted of them saying "hey" on the downbeat, but there were a few other sweet parts where they would sing "sore, sore, sore, soreee" (that's sore -ray, not a muscle ache). The remainder of the lyrics to the song can only be described as what sounded like Japanese old school hip-hop. The guys would sing pretty fast and melodically.

There was one group that had more of a ska feel. They sang a different song. I took some video with my camera just to record the song, but I think it was so loud that it overwhelmed the microphone. You can still make out the melody, but not too well.

Anyway, we walked around Harajuku all afternoon. A few other highlights included finding a döner stand and me speaking German to avoid taking a survey or something. The döner stand was probably my favorite find in Harajuku. I was so psyched to see it that I made everyone walk back to it for lunch. The guy who ran it was really nice and was wearing a red cowboy hat with the symbol from the Turkish flag on it. As it turned out, his wife is Italian so he was able to speak Italian with Steve and Matteo. I devoured my first döner so fast that I had enough time to get a second one before the others finished their first. I got it with a mix of spicy and garlic sauce because I didn't know how spicy it would be and drink options were limited.

The speaking German part came after the kebab. There were people on Omote-sando Dori trying to stop us to ask us questions. I'm not entirely sure what for since we didn't stop. I avoided some of them and was aware of their presence. When one finally did get me, I just spoke to her in German, which I think really confused her. She was guilty of a crime I myself had begun to commit, namely, assuming all white people you see in Japan speaks English. I just stonewalled her with German and continued on my way.

In our wandering around Harajuku I learned that Shibuya is really close by and that's where we got the train home from. Actually, we took the train to Shinjuku and went bowling first. The bowling was pretty much just like home, except all the score keeping was in Japanese and it was on the 7th floor of a building. Also, this particular alley used animations of penguins during your turn to show splits, spares, strikes, etc.

Last weekend: Saturday

Saturday was not terribly exciting last weekend. We went to Asakusa and to the Asahi Sky Room and to Senso-ji temple (all stops I got to make as tour guide on my 3rd time to Asakusa). This time however we did see a guy with a monkey that he trained to do tricks. I was pretty conflicted about it because it seems like a crappy life for the monkey, but it was still entertaining.

The point of going to Asakusa was to take a boat cruise down the Sumida River to Odaiba, which is a man-made island in Tokyo Bay where a bunch of people from the lab live. Sadly we weren't able to get the boat that was fashioned to look like it was a spaceship from the future. That future boat is what people would think of or expect to see in Tokyo. We just got the regular boat and cruised on down the river. The boat went under at least a dozen bridges over the river, each of which had its own character, most of which were painted bright colors. We even went by the backside of the Tsukiji fish market.

When we got to Odaiba we had to take a monorail across to yet another island. We didn't meet up with any of our friends, but we at least got to see where they live and take the monorail that they have to take every day to leave the island to go to campus.

In Odaiba there was some type of festival going on. There are some really ridiculous buildings. I think I have some photos up of them. We wandered around and ended up getting in to a line, which we found out was a line to enter a toy store. Once inside said toy store, we basically stood in a line to snake our way through the store. It was surreal. We basically wandered around and took in the sights, which included a miniature Statue of Liberty.

We went into a mall and I bought some strange flavored Pringles at a Toys R Us. We then found the food court, where Laura and I both got Cinnabon. Steve and Matteo weren't quite as excited for the Cinnabon and got some tempura instead.

More wandering ensued and we eventually took the monorail back out of Odaiba and headed back to Akihabara. We grabbed some Becker's burger and looked for a place to get some sake, which was quickly accomplished down the street from Laura's new apartment. We had some sake, which was served in the ever popular bamboo shaped carafe and cups. I've encountered this style carafe before. It's made to look like it's just a piece of bamboo that's been cut and has a natural cap on the bottom to keep drinks in. I have no idea if it actually was bamboo or not, but it seemed more likely that it was plastic.

It was after this evening in Akihabara that I decided it would fun to walk back to my apartment using my newfound knowledge that I lived on a road that lead directly between the two places. It was raining slightly, but I had nowhere important to be.

If I hadn't walked I might never have noticed the temple I passed on the way back. Or I might not have been lucky enough to follow a completely drunk guy for a few blocks, watching him stagger and stop on the sidewalk a half dozen times, before I had to just pass him and keep going. I walked Hongo-dori the whole way home.