Thursday, January 18th, 2001
Today is much better than yesterday. I wake up early again, moving slowly and staying in late to try and reset my internal clock. Just before the 10:00AM checkout time, I con the hotel clerk into taking my bag for the day. Whew...one of my two biggest worries is over for a while. I walk into Shinjuku slowly, just observing. I stop in multiple bookstores on my way. I use the credit-pointsu karudo-points card, which I had gotten for buying my electronic dictionary, for film and batteries. Then I get a second-story window seat at a lunch counter for lunch. I was overlooking a _huge_ intersection and it was 11:55. I wasn't disappointed either; it was a good show!

Alright! Cheap day so far...it is afternoon and I have only spent $ U.S. 11.00! I wander a bit more in Kabuki-cho, snapping a few pictures. Another bookstore. With all the Toyota books I plan to buy, I am not sure how I am going to try and get them home! I have thought about shipping them back, or maybe I will take them in my pack. But I am not after books, I am on my way to the Shinjuku Gyoen (National Garden.)

This Garden is better than I had expected, and it was the perfect way to spend the afternoon. It is about a kilometer long, with wildlife viewing (wild areas,) a Japanese garden with two teahouses (two coathooks...woohoo!), an "English Landscape Garden," a French garden, several thousand cherry trees, three or four ponds, and unlike every part of my trip so far, almost no people!

Funky tree root (?) formations in the park

Wild vegetation with the NTT Tower in the background

The entry fee is ¥200, or $1.72. Did I mention that my electronic dictionary has currency and tax calculations? :-) This park is what Central Park must be like. I think that there must be as much labelled plant and tree life here as there is in the San Fransisco Arboretum. Most of it is totally unfamiliar to me. I recognize the cherry trees, a metasequoia, an enormous maple with pale smooth bark, rhododendrons, and that is about it. There is also a complex of three one-thousand-meter square greenhouses. Pretty soon I had seen so many orchids, palm trees, and hanging plants I stop paying attention. I laugh out loud at their cactus gallery...the room was humid! Every cactus plant is actually doing okay except the prickley pear, which appears to be nearing the end of a slow and tortuous death. Ah, I guess that's the challenge of growing such exotica! :-)

The Japanese Landscape Garden with teahouse in background

French Landscape Garden looking towards the skyscrapers of Shinjuku

French Landscape Garden

The French garden again, looking East this time

The English Landscape Garden...I presume the grass is green in spring
I see lots of birds in the garden: A huge mob of crows. These Japanese crows seem to be ubiquitous in Tokyo-they have a slightly different call and a different-shaped bill from American crows. I try to ask a local birdwatcher in the park some questions about the crows with the help of my dictionary. He gets across the point that they are not ravens, but crows, but that is all I could really understand. English Sparrows, a small woodpecker (sort of like a Downy's,) a pair of very small grebes, mandarin duck, big, fat, mallard-type ducks, but not mallards, a white egret with yellow legs, a little shorebird running across the ice on the edge of the pond...and Japanese chickadees. There are also green parrots in the park??? I see what looks, acts, and flew like a flycatcher, but for all the world it's call didn't fit the bill (thank you, thank you.) When I come across an interpretive sign about it, I pull out my electronic dictionary, and discover that it is a "bulbul."

I wander for a bit more, getting very tired. By four o'clock I am still tired, but I think the respite of the garden helped. No time for the Sword Museum today...Oh well, that is the nice thing about a vacation with no plan. I call Lester's girlfriend, Echo, as I knew she would be getting off work soon and she asked me to call. She tells me to be at Shinjuku Eki South Exit at 7:00PM. I grab my bag at the hotel first, quite a walk in the other direction. We manage to find each other, and next thing I knew, we had purchased tickets, ridden the train to Ueno, my backpack was in a huge coin locker in Ueno Station, and we were in a bar. This was all new such a novelty to me at this point I was amazed. Our group consisted of me, a Japanese-speaking Irishman, a Slovak guy with passable Japanese skills, Lester's Japanese-speaking Chinese girlfriend, and a Japanese lady who is her boss. And we are sitting around talking in English!

(On our way out of the station, we were stopped by these two girls, maybe high-school aged, who were stylish in an attention-getting sort of way with their bleach-orange-blond hair, unnaturally, scarily dark-tanned skin, massive amounts of white metallic or silver eye shadow, pink scarves, conservative felted-wool overcoats, and knee-high, white leather, platform, go-go boots! They asked Echo and her boss if "the foreigners" could help them decipher an English message on one of their cell phones. It was most likely a Japanese native speaker, and most likely regarding a school or some private lessons. This didn't seem to help them any, so maybe it was a wrong number. I was amazed that these guys I was with, proficient in Japanese, having lived in Japan for years, just slipped right into and out of a foreigner role, usually talking through one of the women, even though they understood the Japanese. I realized that even though I am better off than your average American, I have a lot to learn about Japan still.)

The "bar" we are at is actually an izikaya, a sort of Japanese tavern, with an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can drink (tabehodai, nomihodai) for two hours special. And we are having a ball! I was being invited along on snowboarding trip that weekend, a package deal with airfare, rental, hotel, and lift...on the northern part of the main island. I am tempted for half a second, but realize that I probably can't afford it at the beginning of a long stay. More surprising still, we are in a sort-of seedy district, apparently run by the Korean mafia in Tokyo! Unlike Kabuki-cho, where I was singled-out as a foreigner and harangued frequently, a group as large and varied as ours is ignored by both the salesmen of Ameyoko and the shady mafia-types at the end of the alley. In fact, as we walk towards these mean-looking dudes standing guard at the end of the alley, they immediately step-down, hug the walls, and let us pass with a fair amount of repect. Then right back to looking tough.

Echo invites me to stay at her place, and we catch the last train out to her neighborhood (I guess it is out in the sticks.) The walk from the station to her house is very cold. It is now almost 1:00AM, and we call Lester (8:00AM PST.) I am beyond tired, Echo and I flip the circuit breaker in the middle of the conversation, and Lester has to go to class anyway! In the end we manage to fit in her compact little house and get some sleep.

Yet more observations: Trucks and trains with snow on them driving into town. Everyone in Tokyo is shiverring and complaining because it gets below freezing! Apparently this is a very cold spell here this year. Almost all bikes have a rear-mounted, double-sided kickstand. When up, it points straight back (like rear fender stays) and when down, it holds the rear wheel slightly off the ground. Most bikes also have internally-geared hubs, and built-in locks on the rear wheel. These locks don't prevent the bike from moving, only from rolling. And they are probably three-eighths-inch steel. The two or three nice mountain bikes I have seen are locked with thin cables. The Japanese use maps and ask for directions in Tokyo as much as I do. It is funny to see taxi drivers or motorcycle messengers asking for directions or pulling out maps before their next stops. I hear that is what happens when you build a metropolis around a castle, with the intent of making it difficult to invade.

January 19th, 2001

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