Wednesday, January 17th, 2001
Today sucks...basically. The day starts out waking up at 4:00AM local time (11:00AM PST, just about perfect!) I doze off and on until 7:00, at which point I get up, read for a while, and shower. I leave the hotel at about 9:00, hoping the worst of rush hour is over. I walk to Shinjuku Eki (train station) to find a locker to put my backpack in. I find lockers quite easily, which strikes me as somewhat of a miracle considering my later experience with the place. But, lo and behold, the locker is too small. I stop a janitor and ask him if he knows of any bigger lockers. He asks me where I was going, and I try to tell him walking around. He apologizes and says there are no others in the area. So I walk towards what I thought was the direction of the Youth Hostel. After a slight course correction which took me through some narrow residential alleys, I am headed the right way.

This alley is an amazing study in miniaturization. Cars parked just off the street in front of houses; within two inches of the curb down into the street, and within two inches of the building's exterior wall on the other side. Doorways that seem about four feet tall. Hmm...must be recycling day in the neighborhood. Unlike American alleys, it all looks pretty nice; the recycling in little bags and bundles, and there is bamboo growing in the eight-inch strip of soil between the house and the street.

Despite the recycling, I don't think Japan is completely environmentally conscious. This country seems to rival, or even surpass the U.S. in terms of consumption, screwing over Southeast Asia in the process...but don't get me started on that... OK...So I am heading to the youth hostel to make a reservation and drop and my pack. I begin to get excited...I am close. All I need to do is walk through the park. All I needed to do to get to the park is climb the wall, run across the freeway, climb the wall on the other side (Many Japanese freeways have sound-deadening panels on either side fifteen to twenty feet tall) and then scramble up the twenty-foot sheer bank into the raised park. Right...I walk all the way _around_ the huge park along the freeway frontage road. Let me tell you something...Japanese drivers know where the edges of their vehicles are. Not only can they park with inches or less of clearance, they do it while moving too! Granted, urban traffic isn't very fast, but the cars work their way through pedestrian and bicyclist traffic with inches to spare. Meanwhile, the motorcycle and scooter riders are splitting lanes between the cars! It all goes smoothly enough and with so little apparent concern, I guess it is a fact of Tokyo life and that drivers are aware and people don't get hurt.

Back to the youth hostel saga...there is a sign at the northern gate I can't read, but I gather it is closed. A map shows how to get to the southern entrance, probably another quarter-mile down the road. I march down there slighty frustrated, only to get yelled at by a guard. It is also closed. He doesn't speak any English...another sign I can't read, except that the whole complex the hostel is part of seems to be closed through the 18th at least for construction work! I decide to walk back to the station to see if I can take my pack apart and fit it in the locker. After several frustrating tries, I was forced to admit that although the locker had enough volume to fit the volume of my pack, there was no way to make my pack the appropriate shape-to shrink the carbon fiber stays. OK...the pack is too long. In despair I go back to the hotel, very tired after three hours of hiking and lugging this huge backpack with me. (At this point I don't know the general layout of the station, all the exits, levels, halls, etc. Later on in the week, I find large lockers not too far away, around a dark corner, behind a concrete wall near an obscure exit to the station...oh well!) Along the way I stop three different people and asked them if they knew where coin lockers were. They all apologize and tell me the train station is my best bet. I shell out another eighty-some dollars for the hotel, but tonight my room is non-smoking on the thirteenth floor, not smoking on the first floor. Whee!

It is just after noon, and I am starving, but so is the rest of Tokyo. To kill an hour, I go to the observatory on the forty-fifth floor of the Municipal Government Building.

The view is mighty impressive from up here. I am struck most by the size and monotony of the suburbs; impressive. Fuji-san (Mt. Fuji) is also impressive, but quite faint in the haze. I overhear a young Japanese couple talking in perfect English and feel quite alone. A city tends to be an impersonal place, anyway. When you can't read many of the signs, don't speak the language as well as you could, and many people discriminate against you, it is that much worse. I feel like I could stay in this city for another five years and no one would even try to talk to me.

A growling stomach urges me into action. Per Lester's recommendation, I get my "Canon Super Word Tank" (electronic dictionary/translator) at Yodobashi Camera, and continue on to a cheap restaurant area. I walk in circles for a while surveying my options: soup with squid and raw egg, really pricey bite-sized spaghetti with almost no sauce and lots of seaweed, oysters on rice with lots of green onions. Hmm...what to do when you are in Japan and none of the options look appealing?

By now it is 2:00 and all the lunch specials are over. Amid the blaring advertisements and flashing neon, I see...a gaijin (foreigner)...in casual clothes...with an English map in his hand...a honky, brown hair, sunglasses. Could be American. I greet him in English and ask him if he needs help (I know the Shinjuku area by now.) Turns out he's a Brit, a percussionist in town for a recital. I tell him to check out the free view from the observatory at the top of Government Building, and assure him it was the best thing out of everything I had done so far in Japan...hehehe! Nature calls, so I walk back to the train station. I find my answer in a department store just short of the station. Finally, I go back and get lunch at a noodle place-I get curry udon. About $3.50 for a big bowlful! You walk in, put coins in a machine, and punch a button indicating which menu item you want. Out comes a ticket which you take to the counter, instead of just ordering. Wierd.

My hand-drawn map of all the walking in circles I did during the day!

I go to the biggest and best bookstore around, and also another department store. I spend a while wandering around Kabuki-cho, blinded by the lights and colors, on sensory overload. I duck into a shrine (around the corner from the only pre-war building in the neighborhood) and into near-silent calm. Prayers are hanging everywhere, but I can't read them. In a back, back alley between sex shops I find some more coin lockers of the exact same size. There is supposed to be a capsule hotel here too, but I can't find it. I wander in more circles, looking around through the dusk in vain. As the sun is setting at 4:30 or so, I start to get spacey. I realized that I am a danger in traffic. I stop at a Japanese fast-food place with flavored fast food. I get what I think must be a teriyaki burger. I want the seaweed flavored fries, but I can't figure out how to order them, so I end up with Kimuchi (Korean hot pepper) flavored fries instead. I try to wedge my hulk into the little seat, surrounded by Japanese young women, all smoking nonstop and talking on pink cell-phones incessantly...yuck! I stagger back to the hotel, not quite 6:00 local time. By this time I am so tired I can no longer shake myself into awareness that I am on the other side of the world. I am drained; hips bruised by the pack (my tolerance is down from lack of use,) feet tired, brain tired. Floating along largely unaware, numbed by the overload. My Japan program is far from optimized, and I think my brain just crashed trying to handle the data. I call Lester's girlfriend Echo, and she is very friendly, offering to show me Tokyo. This is probably the highlight of my day.

Several more observations: Japanese are deathly afraid of contagious diseases. They wear masks when sick, or when worried about getting sick. They are always washing their hands. They won't touch food someone else has touched. They ask everyone at the airport; you go through a "health consultation," then immigration, then customs. There are a ton of single cylinder, four stroke motorcycles here. Perhaps it only seems so because they are so loud. The cars are near silent, a two-stroke scooter buzzes by, and then, off in the distance, a motorcyclist on a thumper accelerating through traffic: brrrrrrrmm...BBRRRRM...BBRRRRMMMMMM...BOARrrrrrr. So far, it seems like the rebels ride these funky, stripped-down, cobbled together, quasi-dirt-track-looking 200cc thumper bikes, the messengers go for 400cc four-stroke standards, and an occasional wierdo rides a 250cc two-stroke sportbike.

Also, bicycles: There are tons of city bikes...modern Euro-style, Specialized Globe and the like, and also cheap hybrid bikes. Peugeots seem to be popular imports. I have seen a couple of Specialized, a couple of Cannondale, but not very many nice bikes...there are tons of adult bikes with sixteen-inch wheels! Little single-speed, folding, rear pogo-stick coil-spring suspension things (they can be folded and carried onto the train or subway.) I also saw more old English-style bikes than you would ever see in the States. 3-Speed, steel fenders, rod-actuated brakes, invariably with the seat all the way down, and always...Black.

I would say that everything in Japan gets taken care of, but I wouldn't say it is efficient. In retail situations, there are rarely more than three to five customers per staff, usually less. There are people whose sole job is greeting customers, or standing on a sidewalk at the end of an alley, or at a garage door, waiting to warn pedestrians that a vehicle needs to pull out. There are also people who stand on the street, yelling at passers-by to come in for a look, and they especially seem to love me! Sometimes they are not in front of the store, but at a nearby big intersection, directing traffic, or trying to hand out ads, often in the form of small tissue packets. Of course, I don't think I've seen any trash or dust since I arrived. Not too many homeless either.

January 18th, 2001

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