Davin Reporting!
Our second day in Japan got off to a somewhat late start. Unfortunately, we’ve been staying up quite late every day which then pushes the start of the next day back and helps perpetuate the cycle. It also doesn’t help that I naturally gravitate towards getting up late, and constantly have to fight against that tendency.
In any case, we had considered going to the Tokyo Skytree today, but decided against it. You can’t reserve tickets, and on a weekend there was too much chance that all of the tickets will be taken, especially if we didn’t get down there first thing. Instead we set out to make our way to The Japanese Sword Museum.
We took the train to Shinjuku station and planned to walk to the sword museum from there. Shinjuku station is the busiest train station in Japan and is the one where passengers have to be shoved into the trains during rush hour to get the doors to close. When we arrived the place was quite busy with people everywhere, but it wasn’t rush hour.
This museum was located, rather oddly, in a residential neighborhood– definitely off the beaten track. However, a display at the museum indicates it will be moving to a more official location starting next year. This is a fairly small museum which, as the name suggests, has a number of swords on display, and a few other related objects (sword hilts, texts related to sword construction etc.).
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| The grey building on the right is the Japanese Sword Museum which is surrounded by apartments. |
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| No pics allowed in the museum, but this was an interesting poster. |
An interesting thing that we learned here, and probably the main reason for the museum’s existence is that Japanese sword smiths came up with an intricate method of decorating the blades. Depending on just how the blade was hammered, a pattern could be created in the tempered edge. This could be seen in how light was reflected off of the blade, and it didn’t serve any other purpose besides aesthetics. There were wavy patterns, jagged patterns, and patterns that were fat and thin.
These patterns were associated with various schools of sword smithing. In addition, the metal hilt of each sword was often inscribed with information on its creator, so you can tell who crafted it and when the sword was created. This had originally begun so that the creator could be held accountable for the sword breaking. There were also a few sword scabbards and hilts on display. Interestingly, sharkskin was commonly used to create the sword’s hilt, and each sword scabbard also had a pouch for a utility knife.
Much like English features various sayings based on past history (ex: “It didn’t pan out.”), there are some Japanese sayings influenced by their sword culture. Since each sword had a distinct curvature, it could only fit in a matching scabbard with that same curvature. So, saying two people’s curvatures do not match, means they are incompatible. Having a false tempered edge, refers to study which has no lasting benefit, since it has only been used to temporarily cram in information.
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| This was the toilet in the women's restroom. You can wash your hands in the tank fill water! |
[Kristin Interjection: It was very quiet with no sounds of transportation. Despite being in the middle of a huge city with millions of people, it was more peaceful than the suburban neighborhood that we live in. It is not loud, but we can hear the freeway from our houses.]
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| D became obsessed with these cat cars. He would point them out everywhere. "Look another one!" It's some kind of delivery company. We saw one later in Taiwan too. |
Our path through the residential neighborhood eventually brought us to Tokyo Metropolitan Yoyogi-Park. This being the weekend, the park was quite busy. Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that parks in cities where space is limited, like Tokyo or New York, tend to get a lot more use than those back in San Diego, where more people have yards of their own. Interestingly, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of Europeans in this park– many more than we saw elsewhere in Tokyo. For some reason there were also tons of crows living in the park!
Out the other side of the park was Harajuku station. Supposedly, this is a meeting point for Cosplay people who show up here every third Sunday (of the month?). As this was the third Sunday of the month, we thought we might find them here. Unfortunately, the streets here were an absolute madhouse. The place really was a total madhouse! There were so many people walking around that at times you could barely even move! If something had caused a stampede I’m afraid that a lot of people would have died!
Ultimately, we did not find any Cosplay people around, despite walking around the block several times (at an incredibly languid pace thanks to the throngs of people on the street). We did, however, come across a parade, and discovered that a St. Patrick’s Day festival was going on! That explained a few things, like why a bunch of people were wearing leprechaun hats, and why there were so damn many people on the streets!
[Kristin Interjection: We actually found one Cosplay person. We figure that either it is every third Sunday (and not the third Sunday of the month), or the parade caused the usual get-together to be canceled. Either would not surprise me.]
After watching the parade for a couple of minutes, we quickly– well, actually slowly, thanks to the crowd– made our way back to the train station. Here we caught a train to Shibuya station. I was afraid this train would be very crowded, considering the number of people on the streets, but it seems everyone was trying to get to this area, and only a few were leaving!
The reason we were heading to Shibuya is that directly out front is a famous crosswalk where people cross in all directions at once. When the crosswalk turns green, something like a thousand people cross the street, and then as soon as the light changes they immediately start building up again! And it definitely looked like a thousand, or at least quite a few hundred, people crossed the street while we watched! (I have to say that Tokyo is a pretty crazy place. While I don’t mind visiting, I’m not sure I could handle living here!)
The last place we planned to see was Venus Fort, which is a mall that has an interior designed to look like Venice, Italy. Unfortunately, the path to get there was not without its pitfalls. The train system in Tokyo is a bit strange. There are colored lines, but then there are also some trains that change lines and continue on along a different line, before changing back. To make things even more confusing, only specific trains change, which means if you get on an earlier train, it may follow a different route.
The reason that matters is because Google maps told us to take a specific train to our destination, but we actually moved faster than it thought we could and got on the train before it. That meant the train we were on would follow a different path, in the wrong direction. I heard an announcement at the station to change trains to a different line, but I wasn’t sure exactly what line we were supposed to take (Kristin apparently wasn’t listening to the announcement). In the end we realized something was wrong, only after the train had left the station. That was the first mistake!
The second mistake was that we immediately got off the train at the next station. How could that be a mistake, you say? After all, why would we want to ride a train even further away from our destination. Well, it turned out the train we were on was a local train that stopped at every station. The station we got off at was only served by trains every half hour or so! So, we had to wait for at least 20 minutes on the platform while at least three trains rushed past without stopping.
Lessons learned: 1) When in doubt, get off the train, especially when you know that trains are running regularly. 2) If you find yourself on the wrong train, sometimes it’s faster to go to a further station, rather than get off at the first station (how to figure that out on the fly is another question, however).
[Kristin Interjection: It also didn’t help that the train we wanted was a blue line and the train we were on was a different shade of blue. And not a strikingly different shade of blue– dark blue and darker blue. If the color had been different, I would have immediately realized something was wrong!
Some more interesting information. The subway lines in Tokyo are owned and run by two different companies. You can get a day pass for one or the other, or a combined pass. If you only get one, you have to pay attention to stay off the one you don’t want to use. We were able to use our JRPs on the regular Metro lines. So we had to stay off the other companies lines or we would have to pay.]
Anyway, after wasting a half an hour to 45 minutes, we managed to arrive at the Tokyo Teleport Station. Yes, that’s actually the name of the station. At first, I thought it had to be some weird translation from Japanese to English, but the station’s name is spelled in Katakana (“teleporuto”), which means that really is it’s intended English name. I guess that they were going for a futuristic theme for this station, because they have little blue circles, which I guess are intended to represent teleporters on the ground. The station’s color scheme was blue and white, and it really did look like something out of a sci-fi movie.
[Kristin Interjection: The trains going to Tokyo Teleport station are owned by yet a third company, so we had no choice but to pay for the ride to and from that station! Oh my gosh! Why isn’t it all just one system like every other city we’ve ever visited!]
Unfortunately, here we also learned another weird lesson about Tokyo’s train system. Apparently even though Japan Rail runs most of the trains, some of them are, inexplicably, run by private companies, and this is one of them! You can get onto these private lines without even knowing it, and maybe if you have a normal ticket the entire process is completely seamless. However, we didn’t have normal, paid tickets, we had our JRPs, which weren’t valid here, so we had to pay an additional fare to get off here! (The cost was fairly minor and it wouldn’t have affected our decision to come here, but it was still annoying.)
From the outside Venus Fort didn’t look like anything impressive. It was a standard three story, enclosed mall, with an attached Ferris Wheel. Things got more interesting when we reached the mall and went inside. First of all, in checking the cost of the Ferris Wheel, we discovered that there was a huge Toyota showroom located here. Pretty much every Toyota car in existence could be seen here.
They had some racing simulator video games. I’m not sure whether that was primarily intended to entertain kids, or whether it was a draw for Japanese video gamers in general– which as we saw at the SEGA Arcade included business men. There were also some more unusual prototype style cars on display, although I don’t believe they were actually for sale. One which Kristin and I found especially amusing was a small, one-person electric vehicle, which was sort of like an enclosed, four wheeled motorcycle. Surprisingly, I managed to fit inside it quite easily, although it being a one seater was obviously a draw back.
Although we did not verify exactly how this worked, it appeared there was a video screen where you could order up a test drive of a car. There was a large roadway ramp that ran through the inside of the building, and then led outside. We think the way this might work is you order up your test drive, and then that ramp is used to deliver your vehicle outside, where you can drive it around. It was unclear whether you get in and then drive yourself outside (or have someone drive you outside), or whether you just meet the car outside.
In any case, this showroom was quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. Actually, it was probably a better way to test drive and order a car, than going to your average car dealership with bloodthirsty salesmen hovering around! Kristin says that there used to be a building in downtown Tokyo that had a showroom like this, but that it appeared to have been shutdown some years ago. It’s possible that this was its replacement, and we just happened to stumble upon it by accident!
After checking out the Toyota showroom we made our way to the Ferris Wheel, but opted to pass due to the price and the time involved. There was also another large arcade here, which we glanced inside. The arcade looked to be fairly massive, but we’d already seen the SEGA arcade and weren’t really interested in browsing through another one.
The interior of Venus Fort was interesting to see. The corridors were decorated to appear like faux stone buildings. The ceiling looked like a night, or late twilight sky, and the lighting in the corridors was fairly subdued to match. Obviously, shops were built into the building facades. There was also a circular “square” which featured a fountain, and more shops looking down onto it. Altogether it reminded me of something from Las Vegas, or maybe an amusement park.
[Kristin Interjection: It looked almost exactly like a mall Scott and I walked through in Vegas. I’m terrible with names though, so I can’t remember its name. Perhaps you readers know which one I’m thinking of!]
Inside Venus Fort, we found another Toyota display, only this one featured historical automobiles. One weird car from I’d say the 1940s or 50s had a door that opened from the front of the car, rather than from the side. If I recall correctly I’ve seen one of these weird cars before, at a small car show in Bayreuth, Germany.
[Kristin Interjection: Another interesting thing we encountered were employees of clothing shops yelling for people to enter their store to take advantage of a 20% off sale. A few doors down was another clothes store and another employee was trying to shout over the other one down the hall to entice shoppers into her store instead. The two female employees who were battling it out to yell the loudest had amazingly shrill voices. Caught between these two clothing hawkers all I wanted to do was run away as fast as possible. I can’t believe that actually works to increase business! Either way, I’m glad that such behavior is not allowed (or has been determined to not work?) in the United States. Using signs and having people stand out front to entice people is fine, but having multiple people up and down a mall hallway screaming at the top of their lungs that a sale is on is absolutely unbearable!
It was similar to what we encountered in the old town shopping street of Hangzhou, China, but at least that was outside and they used microphones to broadcast to people passing in the street. They weren’t screaming over one another! This was the first time that I encountered this sales technique in an indoor modern shopping complex.]
We glanced at a few of these cars, but quickly lost interest and hurried to find something to eat. We actually were quite hungry at this point, as it was already late afternoon and we hadn’t eaten much of anything for breakfast! At the mall food court, we briefly flirted with the idea of going to an Indian curry restaurant, before settling on a restaurant serving Japanese food (we were, after all, in Japan). We ordered tonkatsu and pork don meals, which included a miso soup and rice. These were both reasonably priced, and also quite good.
The mall food court also provided you with free water to drink, which you retrieved from a special station (most of the restaurants did not appear to be selling drinks). However, I also noticed that there was a sign stating that outside food and drink were prohibited for hygiene reasons! That annoyed me because the reason was an obvious load of B.S. (apparently everyone packing a brown bag lunch is engaging in an unhygienic practice!). While I can understand why they want to prohibit outside food and drink– so they sell more food– if you’re going to do that then you should just be honest about it! Offering up such an obvious lie comes across not only as tacky, but also insulting to people’s intelligence!
With a good meal in our stomach, we left the mall and spent a couple of minutes viewing the buildings outside, which also appeared somewhat futuristic. It seems like that was the theme for the whole area, including the Tokyo Teleport Station. We then proceeded by train back to our hotel to collect our luggage, and returned to the Tokyo train station. Here we were confronted by a dilemma: our time in Tokyo was coming to its close, and yet we hadn’t found a postcard for the city!
Surprisingly, finding a postcard turned out to be more difficult than expected. You’d think in a large train station in Tokyo, you could find at least a few places selling postcards of the city, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! Apparently postcards aren’t very popular here in Japan, and all the shops in the station catered only to local Japanese people, not tourists! We did find a hand drawn postcard at a bookstore, which we weren’t entirely satisfied with, but another 30 minutes of searching produced nothing. I guess we were lucky to even find the card that we did!
[Kristin Interjection: We went back about bought the hand drawn card. I was getting pretty grumpy at this point because I’d lost interest in finding a better postcard and I was tired of walking around all day and now walking around with my heavy pack. D had a heavy pack too, but he is less moody than I am!]
Since we were at the very start of the Shinkansen line, and leaving fairly late in the day, we had decided to take our chances with unassigned seats. Traveling unassigned allows for more flexibility on your departure time, with the obvious tradeoff being that you may not find a seat at all! As it turned out, it wasn’t a problem at all, as there were plenty of open seats, and things only improved over the course of our journey. This train also had power outlets for us, so I took advantage of the opportunity to work on some of my blog entries for Australia (obviously we are a bit behind!). Kristin also worked on her computer.
We arrived in Kyoto around 9:30 PM, which wasn’t that bad– or so I thought– and we quickly checked in to our hotel, which was right outside the train station. The trouble is, we’d only eaten a single solid meal today, and we were hungry again. But, it couldn’t be a problem, right? The Kyoto train station was an absolutely massive complex, with (we’d later discover) about four entirely different attached malls! We went outside and down into an underground complex where there were dozens and dozens of shops, and at least a dozen restaurants! Literally hundreds of people were still walking around!
And all of the restaurants were closed. Closed! Sure, there were still people in them, but they weren’t letting anyone else sit down. Even though the place was still crawling with people! How could they possibly be closed with so many potential customers still around? It was mind boggling! Once again, the Japanese just didn’t want our money!
After this experience, it is no longer a mystery to me why the Japanese economy is perpetually in the dumps. There is no way in hell you’d find all the restaurants closed in the U.S. with that many people milling around the hallways and many of them trying to enter the closed restaurants, especially when trains are known to keep arriving even late into the night. But, no, in Japan they all closed completely at 10 PM, which meant no new customers after 9:30 PM.
Anyway, it was looking like we were going to have to settle for convenience store food again. That had been OK at first, but it was starting to grow tiring, although I suppose we would survive. But then, just across from our hotel we found a restaurant that was open until midnight! An ambitious restauranteur! Who would have guessed? The owner must have spent some time in America, maybe he even was an American!
This restaurant was actually a bit pricey, but it also served some very interesting Japanese cuisine, so we resolved to come here not only tonight, but tomorrow as well. Tonight we ordered shabu-shabu, which was something that one of Kristin’s middle school friends suggested on Facebook. This dish actually takes a little bit of explaining.
Basically with shabu-shabu, you are provided with a cook pot filled with broth at your table. The cook pot is placed on top of a portable burner, and the broth is basically heated to near boiling. You are also given small slices of meat and vegetables. The meat, in this case, were thinly sliced pieces of beef and pork. Our vegetables were some basic leafy greens, but also included some weird white thing that I couldn’t even identify. I thought it might be some relative of a mushroom, but I’m not sure that actually makes sense.
In any case, the way this works is you take the meat and vegetables and place them in the cook pot. Because the meat is sliced so thinly it only takes a few seconds for them to be cooked through. You then remove them from the pot and dip them in some sauce and eat them. It works about the same for the vegetables, and a few seconds was enough to make the unidentified, rigid, white vegetable become flaccid and edible.
It was definitely a unique experience, and I quite enjoyed the meal! Anyone who finds themselves in Japan should give shabu-shabu a try, for the novelty alone. Unfortunately, Kristin was less impressed by it. It seems our difference of opinion came down to the fact that I pretty much enjoy just eating one piece of meat or vegetables at a time. Meanwhile, she claims to prefer having a mix of flavors. I pointed out that shabu-shabu wasn’t really any different in that regard than sashimi or nigiri (which, I should add, were also included on the side), and she basically replied that she didn’t really like them that much either (in fairness, I tend to prefer the rolls myself).
[Kristin Interjection: Except salmon sashimi which I love! But even that, about 5-6 pieces is enough. Later on, when we were back on the ship, D decided one day that we should make a meal out of tuna sashimi. Tuna sashimi is also delicious, but make a whole meal out of it? No way! D couldn’t understand my resistance. I said, “Is that even healthy??” I really don’t know but I didn’t want to eat THAT much sashimi and nothing else for a meal!]
After completing the meal, Kristin insisted on ordering tempura ice cream, despite my extreme reluctance to get it. I still remembered the green tea ice cream from Jeju-do, and I was afraid that deep fried ice cream was likely to be completely disgusting. My reticence was only reinforced by Kristin’s statement that you could buy deep fat fried ice cream at the Del Mar Fair, since I consider the Del Mar Fair to be about the stupidest thing in the world!
[Kristin Interjection: My reply to his being afraid it would be like green tea ice cream was, “But this is vanilla ice cream. Is says so clearly right there! How can deep fat frying vanilla ice cream make it bad?”]
Well, I was wrong about this one. Tempura ice cream actually turned out to be pretty damn good! It was really just vanilla ice cream inside a deep fat fried exterior– it’s a bit of a mystery to me how they manage to pull that one off– with chocolate sauce on the side. It’s much better than green tea ice cream that’s for sure!
[Kristin Interjection: I like that it is warm and crunchy on the outside but the ice cream interior is still solid and cold. I could look up how they make it, but it is more fun to think of it as magic! ;p]
We paid our bill and crossed the street to our hotel, finally putting an end to a long and eventful day!
Tomorrow’s Adventure: Nara, Japan (March 21, 2016)
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