two nights in tokyo

harajukua picture for aaronshibuya by night

shibuya by day

shinjuku

the walls by our hostel

old tokyo

a big golden yam

asakusa at night

asakusa

pictures from the ferris wheel

the second weekend we went to Tokyo

sometimes i wish i lived in Tokyo

a love letter to Tokyo:
dear Tokyo, i love you. love sam

we took the shinkansen at six o' clock (in the morning). the shinkansen is the superfast train. it was my first time. the shinkansen is a super hero. Tikou (3 year old little boy) has a shinkansen lunch bag with a shinkansen shaped container for his shinkansen printed hand washing towel and shinkansen lunch box containers. Kouhei (other 3 year old boy) always admirers it. Atsushi has a shinkansen back pack. there are three levels of fastness: red, blue, and yellow... i think we took the yellow one, but really i can't remember... but i think the Nozomi is the fastest. on the train we (i) unsuccessfully slept. just outside of tokyo everything started looking all squishy and packed together, but then when we got to tokyo everything spread out again like normal and things got taller. the way people talk about it i thought the city would be a state of constant jam packedness ie. people always in your personal space shoulder to shoulder i can't breath the buildings are closing in on me ahhhhhh!!!! but its not its just a normal city except bigger and maybe more wonderful. some places are busier and there are lots and lots of people but it's not so bad and it's definately not like that all the time. but then again maybe its just me cause i kind of like it where all the people are. i think we got to Tokyo around 10am and it was cloudy and rainy looking but not raining yet. from the shinkansen we took the subway to akihabara station (there were little kids that were japanese beaver equivalents and we gave both groups money and we got two green feathers each. i lost one but i still have the other taped in my book.) where we got a little bit lost but in the end (thanks to steph) made it to our hostel in asakusa (steph also made the booking... i really did nothing). we stayed at the sakura (cherry blossom) hostel in a room filled with four bunk beds and very little walking space. but i liked it. it was very clean and the bathrooms were nice and there were computers and everything about just seemed good. asakusa is a district of tokyo with the atmosphere of old Tokyo (as defined by the guide books... and it seemed that way esp. comparatively speaking). there was a temple with a really big red lantern and a little lantern lined street of vendor style open aired shops and on the street lights there were branches of cherry blowwoms (not real because the cherry blossoms were over by then). the temple had a big statues of buddha and we walked through a park with lots of little food stalls where we had some fired chicken that was quite good. the walk to the hostel was past a amusement park and we saw ninjas (but i don't think they were real ninjas) and through an arcade (japanese indoor/outdoor shopping mall) where we later had some scrumptious ramen at a very little restaurant (i had ramen last night when i went osaka and it was good but not as good. ramen is broth, often miso or fish based, with special noodles and slices of pork... i watched a show on the history of ramen, which originally came from china but now differs quite a lot from its original form, that was quite captivating but in japanese of course). that first day in tokyo we went to the man made future island of odaiba. we took a train and then another train and we crossed a bridge. there were tall buildings... some of them quite interestingly shaped, but all in all it wasn't really all that interesting or impressive. it was less like the future and more like the present unless there was, quite possibly, something i was missing. we walked around some and then we found the world's biggest ferris wheel (in 1991... its in the guiness book of world records) (note: japan as many very large ferris wheels speckiling its coast line)... i had to be convinced, but in the end i made a deal and i conceded to sharing a ride for the price of an ice cream cone. and it wasn't really all that bad at all... although i made sure we didnt go on one of the glass gondalas that has see through floors and everything because im pretty sure that would have been just too much. it was preperation for what would come (stay tooned for the next installment when sam goes to the Umeda Sky Building and its Floating Garden).
after that we took the train back to the main island and headed to shinjuku (which is `the district around Japan's busiest station'). Shinjuku is everything. everything, everything, everything. it is everything you thought Tokyo would be. shinjuku is the seedier district. shinjuku is love hotels and yakuza, and bars where business men go after work, and little back alley yakitori restaurants, and the most strip clubs i have ever seen in my life, and maid cafes, and lights lights lights. oh how i love the lights. so we walked around shinjuku for a while and some drunken teenagers sang us a song. on this night or another night we went to shibuya (`a popular district with youth' and the place where japan's busiest intersection is... its also where that big screen is on the building where in Lost in Translation scarlet johanson sees the elephant walk across the building). shibuya is one of my favorite places in japan,　it is one of my favorite places in the whole wide world. everything is big and there are lots of light like in shinjuku and there are people people people. the intersection makes a triangle and the people flood the intersection and rule the world. cars do not exist. its great, i love it. tokyo is a mess of small back alley streets. they are the best streets you could ever know. and some of them are sketchy and filled with bars and hotels that charge for a three hour rest and gentlemen's clubs, and some of them are filled with cheap restaurants serving grilled meat to a see of men in blck suits and white collared shirts, and some of them are filled with little stores and indian restaurants. they are all quite marvalous. in shibuya i jumped a little and sang a song of happiness, it went like this. Where are we? We're in Tokyo. i think you had to be there. after we traversed those paths we headed home for a good nights sleep.

the next day we went walking in shibuya and found steph some shoes and went to harajuku although we didnt get to see where all the cool kids hang out. down shibuya past the really crowded busy part it spreads out and becomes a place that reminds me of new york (when i dream of living in tokyo i dream of living there). there were lots of cool little stores and i bought josh his kanye west sunglasses and got a few other key peices. in harajuku we saw all the stores with all the crazy styles but none of the stylin people although there were many people to be sure... but i've found out where they hide and i will capture them next time to be sure. we went to a little indian restaurant for dinner in shibuya and i had butter chicken and vegtable curry and huge peices of nan and mango lassi and it was simply delicious. if you consider it to be a problem than you would have to say the problem begins here. it was maybe just past 9:00pm we did not have a hotel reservation for that night we had made no attempts to make one, there was no room at the place we had been staying. we were going to find a love hotel but we couldn't find them. we went to tokyo station (the shinkansen back to okubo was at 4am) but only the big fancy expensive hotels were there, we missed the last train to shinjuku where the love hotels surely would be, we walked the back streets trying to find a place to stay. we couldn't find a mcdonalds to sit in, we consdidered sleeping in a karaoke room but the rates were just too expensive for us. we sat on the ground by the station, i called uncle malky and pilar and paul. we walked the back streets and realized the plain clothes women bundled up to their necks were actually prostitutes. eventually we found a japanese fast food restaurant the name of which i do not know to sit in until our 4am train. we bought the cheapest things. we were both full up to our ears already. i had a bowl of rice. we ordered what we thought was cake but turned out to be cold blocks of tofu of a jelly like consistancy that were not of an appetizing nature at all. there were two and then three men working there. they were really nice. i think they knew we didnt have any place to go. or maybe they were just wonderful. in the 4 something hours we sat on the stools lining their counter we did not order more than 5 dollars worth of food collectively but sat playing boxes and watching a video on stephs ipod (the name of which i forget but which was very good) and they never once looked at us in a menacing sort of way or really take any notice of us at all but merely continued to clean. im sure if it was toronto or mcdonalds we would have been asked to order something else or leave. and the people would have looked at us like bums. and in the subway station in Tokyo all the homeless people are aloud to sleep at night and the policemen dont even bug them or anything and when we were walking around in the station camping out there all not seemed like a perfectly plausible possibility because no one ie. the security guards didnt seem to　mind at all. except that the washrooms were locked　(understandable because someone cleans them and they dont want them to get messed us by a bunch of hoodlems like us every night). that was the only problem... me and steph had to go to the washroom bad the whole night but we couldn't find one (the fast food place we stayed at didnt have one) so we had to hold until the station opened just before the first train which incidentally was our own. i actually didnt mind being homeless for a night in tokyo too much at all. i think it was an adventure. anyways, it seems like what's supposed to happen when you go to tokyo.... so at 4am we took our train and tried to sleep (steph did but i didnt) and got to okubo with time to spare (before i started work at 11:30am) and i took a shower and brushed my teeth and called david z while i stood outside amity and waited for it to open. and that is the story of the two days i didnt sleep.