Travel day. This is where I head out from Tokyo to Osaka. Of course, it also turns out to be the first completely sunny day I’ve seen since I’ve got here. I clean up and leave Teman’s house before they get up. I get a ticket on the next available shinkansen but screw up and miss it since I had the track wrong. I just go get another ticket and let them know and it turns out I only have to wait another 10-15 minutes for the next one.

The JR rail pass doesn’t let you ride the fastest shinkansen, the nozomi, but the ride still only takes about 3 hours from Tokyo station to Shin-Osaka station. When they put the shinkansen lines in they often had to put in new stations, thus the shin- prefix. From there I had to transfer to another JR line going downtown and then transfer again to

pick up the JR loop line which puts me just a short walk from my hotel, The New Otani Osaka.

Now that I’ve been away from Tokyo several times I’ve come to realize how easy I had it. Most trains and subways, with the exception of the shinkansen, there is no english announcement. There is no status indicator as to where you are at. You have to pay attention. Usually at least one door on the train has a dual-language map of the stops but often most of the maps around the station don’t have english on them. You also run into the different level of service (express/local) more often and have to pay attention to the map as to which ones will stop at the stop you want. I’ve run into subway fare maps now that have not a lick of romaji on them. Its not really that difficult, you just need to be a bit more prepared and be willing to spend a little bit more time hunting around for that one map that has the information you need.

My hotel is in a pretty sweet spot, just across from Osaka-jo and the giant park that surrounds it. Its pretty upscale, almost too upscale for me. Check-in is a breeze, everybody speaks pretty good english including the bellhop who they have walk me through the features of my room.

There are a number of restaurants in the hotel but they are all a bit too upscale for me. Instead I head over to a local shopping area and pick up some squid and pork yakisoba and a frosty cold nama birru. mmmm.

Today I decided to head north to Nikko, a town in the mountains home to the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu (the famous Shogun James Clavell fictionalized in his book). The guidebook listed two ways I could get there - take the Tobu line or take a shinkansen and then trasfer to a JR local line. The book recommeded the option over the second as being less of a hassle so even though the JR option would have been free to me, I chose to try the first.

I got to the Tobu entrance no problem, it was very easy to find. They had the standard map with prices and ticket machines so I saw how much it was going to be (1320), hit the english button, and purchased my ticket. Except, instead of 1320 it was for 1300. Strange. I head up the the turnstiles and it doesn’t want to let me in. < sigh >. I walk over to the guard to try and explain the situation but he doesn’t speak english so he walks me over to help desk where the ladies there are marginally better. I piece together that the issue is I’m 20 short, but I can’t figure out why or what I should do next. Eventually we work it out that I’m supposed to go back down stairs.

Next to the machines is a line with an actual cashier that I’m hopeful can help me out - I’m getting a little frantic since I only have a couple of minutes before my train leaves. I ask him if he understands english to see I can explain the situation to him and get a surly wakarimasen. At this point I decide I’ve consigned myself to trying to buy a completely new ticket from him but he sees my previous ticket and I’m able to just pay a 20 yen fare to get a new, different ticket. This one is completely in japanese so I’m a bit confused but I know I’m supposed to get on car six. So I double check the reader board as to the track I run back upstairs to the platform. I think I’ve found the right track but the train has a different destination marked on it. I’m starting to freak a bit more since I’m at the 2 minute mark, I run back to the help desk and confirm I have the right train with the ladies there. I run back and start looking for car numbers like some of the other trains have, but I can’t find any. I finally just hop on and we’re off like 10 seconds later.

Now, these local trains are bit different that the nice ones in Tokyo. First of all, there is no “you are here, next stop blah” indicator, all you get is a map with station names also in english above one of the doors. The announcer speaks all in japanese and although each station has a combination english/hirigana/kankii sign being in the last car you can’t see it for the smaller stations until you pull out of the station. Now, if had any wits on me I would have realized that the reason the train wasn’t labelled with my destination (Tobu-Nikko) was that I was going to have to transfer. The map even showed the junction point. Now, at each station there are signs as to the next stop down the line. We pull into the station where the line diverges and I see 2 destinations listed as whats next. I stupidly gamble that this train will get me where I want to go. I loose. I hop off as soon I’ve realized mistake and I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. The station is just a tiny strip and is completely disserted but the smells coming down from the mountain are just wonderfull. I wait 25 minutes until a train coming the other direction and work my way back to the trasfer point. 20 minutes later I’m in Nikko after a 3+ hour ordeal.

Nikko is just awesome, favorite place so far. The temples and shrines are in the midst of old growth timber and the place has a magical ambiance to it. Going into some of the temples, smelling a combination of freshly wet forest with the slightly musty temple aroma and the lingering hint of incense takes takes you back in time. It quickly gets late though and I have to leave before seeing everything so I can make it back to Tokyo to meet Teman before it gets too late.

I go the JR route back which involves taking a local train and then transfering to a shinkansen to make my way back to Tokyo. Shinkansen have both reserved and unreserved seats - normally reservations cost a little more but they are free with the JR pass. You just walk up to a ticket desk, let them know where you want to go (Tokyo, onigaishimasu) and then convey your smoking preference. You can get tickets for a specific train however if you’re lazy you don’t have to specify a train and just get tickets for the next available. The ride back is mostly uneventful, except for the part where I wake an older sleeping salaryman who I think is in my seat before I realize the seats are lettered from right to left on this train, not left to right. Doh!

I get home just after Teman and we head out for this place he’s been wanting to try that has 40 japanese microbrews on tap. After a little searching we find it and its well worth the trouble. Up to this point most restaurants just have a single “nama birru” or draft beer and its always your typical lager. I had yet to see a japanese microbrew. This place had a huge selection and almost nothing was a lager - IPAs, pale ales, stouts (including some nitro tapped options), you name it. We tried half size after half size sampling their menu and I was very impressed, the Japanese can really do some good beers.

We had to leave around 11 since the trains stop at midnight. The trains were packed with people on their way home after a Friday night out. Its a very different atmosphere than the morning commute where everybody is practically silent. At stations you would see people making a mad dash for their connection to make sure they made it home before the last train.

Pictures on Flickr.

Got a little earlier start today and worked my way over to the Tsukiji fish market. The smell of fish was apparent as soon as I got off subway indicating I was in the right place. It was raining pretty good so the crowds were pretty tightly packed underneath the canopies the covered the thin walkways of the market alleys. I was way too late for the fish auction but it was still interesting seeing all that was for sale. I wasn’t really thinking and had a big breakfast before I went - I should have had sushi there for breakfast instead.

I then worked my way over to Tokyo station so I could activate my rail pass. The procedure was quick and very painless, I just had fill out a very very short application and hand over both the pass voucher and passport for inspection. At all the JR turnstiles there is a lane that is manned. You just flash the guard your pass on the way in and out and thats it.

From there I hopped on a train to Kamakura, a town on the ocean an hour south from Tokyo that is well know for its abundance of shrines and temples. The place was just crawling with school kids. Every now and then a group of 5-10 kids would cry out “Hello!” in unison when they saw me - very cute.

The first thing I did when I got there was buy a cheap umbrella since it was still raining pretty good. The use of umbrellas is pretty ubiquitous here in comparison to rainy Seattle back home. In Seattle when it rains its often windy and/or cold so I usually just wear a rain coat. Here its often a too warm for a rain coat and not so windy so its a more natural fit. Almost all the stores have at least an umbrella rack out front, the nice places actually have someone out front that will wrap up your umbrella for you in a plastic sheath so you don’t drip water everywhere.

I wandered around Kamakura hitting a couple of main sites such as Hachimangu but I hit the burnout point after walking all the way out to the ocean to find not much there. Too many days of walking around, I was just exhausted. I hit the giant Buddha and Hase Temple and cut my visit short.

For dinner we hit “To the herbs”, a nice italian place. I wimped out and didn’t go for the natto and cuttlefish pasta and instead just had a “Classico” pizza which reminded me very much of the pizza I had in Italy many years ago.

Pictures on Flickr.

Today I hopped on the Ginza line to Shimbashi where I got off and hopped on the Yurikamome over to Odaiba. Odaiba is an artificial island in Tokyo bay that went through a period of development in the 90s. Its home to a gaggle of malls, some parks, and its own (albeit much smaller) statue of liberty apparently given to Japan by France back in 2000. The day was rainy and Odaiba isn’t really that interesting but the views you get off the Yurikamome made the trip worth while.

After that I made my way to the Yamanote line and hopped off at Ueno to explore Ueno Park. Ueno is a huge park contains a couple of temples, a number of museums, a zoo, and a ton of homeless people. Homeless in Japan are definitely different that what we see back in the US. There is no panhandling from what I have seen and they are apparently permitted to build sometimes intricate shelters using the ubiquitous blue tarp. All their stuff is usually neat and squared away.

For dinner we went out to a yakiniku restaurant where I tried beef tongue for the first time. It was thinly sliced and a bit chewy but quite good. Afterwards Teman and I hit another super-dinky bar (seating capacity - maybe 8) that had a rasta-theme - dub music, lots of pictures of reggae stars on the wall. One decoration really stood out - it was a mini-mural painted across a number of skateboard decks of a number of black gentleman, including one who looked a bit like ice cube driving a low rider through (on closer investigation) a river, another who at first glance looked like he was skateboarding but given that it was apparently a river must have been surfing I guess. Written in the middle was the expression “Do the recommended thing”. Strange.

Photos on flickr.

Today started out a bit rainy so instead of heading right out I sat down and worked on planning out the next leg of my trip. I’m planning on staying with Tokyo for the rest of the week although I’ll be activating my rail pass on Thursday and taking day trips out of tokyo for the next couple of days, then leaving on Saturday for parts unknown. I originally was going to just call up places but being a bit lazy I browsed around and found that Travelocity actually had pretty good Japan coverage for online hotel reservations. As of right now I’ve got reservations to go to Osaka for Sat/Sun and then the next 4 days in Kyoto. Since I’ve been doing things really cheap so far (thanks to Teman!), I decided to splurge and go to some pretty decent hotels so we’ll see how it turns out. Afterwards I think I’m going to go all the way out to Nagasaki and then work my way back to Hiroshima/Miyujima but I think I’m going to hold off an research a bit more first.

Once that was out of the way I headed to the now very familiar Gaienmae station and hopped on the Ginza line to, well, Ginza. Ginza is another upscale shopping district full of towering skyscrapers that caters to more mature tastes than say, Harajuku. From Ginza I walked down to Hibiya Park, an urban oasis in the middle of high-rises. After walking around and seeing some of the biggest koi I’ve seen in my life I headed north to the Imperial Palace. You can’t go inside except for twice a year and there are guards at all the gates but the double bridge and the big moat walls are an impressive sight, although some of the rebuilt buildings around the perimeter could do with a bit of remodeling.

From the imperial palace I headed over to the incredibly busy Tokyo Station with the goal of taking the Yamonote line up to Akihabara. The way you take the trains is very simple - there are huge maps in the train station that show the different lines and how much it costs to get to the various stops from here. Once you have figured out how much its going to cost you, you walk up to a machine, push the “english” button, and proceed to purchase a ticket with that amount encoded on it. On your way to the train you pass your ticket through a turnstile that encodes your starting location and spits the ticket back to you. On the way out you just feed the same ticket to a similar turnstile and, assuming you got the price right, you go on your way.

There are a number of different lines that pass through Tokyo Station including the Shinkansen lines so it can be a confusing place but luckily the lines are color coded to help you find your way - you just need to make sure you know some of the stations in the direction you plan on going to make sure you get on the right train. The trains themselves, at least for the Yamonote which circles the heart of Tokyo, have nice graphical readouts that alternate between english and japanese that show where the train is currently located at as well as dual language announcements for which stop is coming up.

Akihabara (also known as Electric Town) is a crazy place filled with multi-level electronics stores, watch stores, games stores, manga/anime/porn stores, pachinko parlors, arcades, and the occasional maid cafe. Every thing from computers and cell phones to resistors, cabling, and ham radio equipment is for sale either at one of the small shops that line the street or one of the megastores that spiral up 5-10 levels. There were a number of duty free places as well that visitors could escape paying taxes with the right documentation. Prices, from what I saw, were not really better than what you can get off the internet but the selection was incredible. Seeing shop after shop with all these cool cell phones we don’t get in the states was making me a bit bitter. I spent some time exploring Yodobashi Camera which was probably the biggest store in the neighborhood by far. Think Fry’s but bigger, much bigger.

By now it was getting to be about 6 so I decided to head on back. I took the Yamonote to Shimbashi and transfered to the Ginza line. The Yamonote wasn’t that bad but on the Ginza I got to experience the quintessential “packed in like a sardine” Tokyo subway experience. You get pushed around in the crowd almost like it was river as people try to make room for people to get on. If you are lucky, you end up next to something you can hang on to otherwise you get caught up in the crowd as it leans to and fro as one as the subway starts, stops, or takes tight curves.

For dinner, Teman and I headed over to a favorite haunt of his - a tiny little belgium bar that does some small, artsy dishes. Its literally just a single bar with space for maybe 8 people tucked away below sidewalk level. The barkeep/cook/owner is a friendly guy with decent english skills which made ordering much easier since the menu was just a hand-written chalk board all in japanese. We split a number of small dishes - chinese pork that you wrap in lettuce leaves with a bean paste (sorta like what I’ve had at Shilla back home), a middle-eastern hummus dish, and a beef & avocado salad.

Pictures on Flickr.