Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part 1

Wednesday

Wed Apr 12 2000

I was awake at 5:30. Strange light was coming through the crack between my curtains--fluorescent lights from inside an express train, right outside my window. I could almost hear the trains, but they were just whispers. My ears had been battered by ten hours of jet engine noises, and the hotel walls had great sound insulation. When I stepped into the bathroom, train noises chuckled down from the vents.

I was still pretty sick. I popped a decongestant to dry my running nose so that I could think about other things. In these early morning hours, I finally sorted out my mental list of things to do while in Tokyo.

I went to Yokohama, hoping to see the sailing ship Nippon Maru and the Yokohama Maritime museum. The train pulled into the SakuragiCho station just in time to release a slew of commuters and me. I was in a good mood. The train had been pretty crowded, but it had been crowded full of a bunch of people who know how to behave on a crowded train. Having put up with the grousing, grumbly nature of my fellow N Judah streetcar riders back in San Francisco for a couple of years, this was a nice reminder of how things can be.

Minato Mirai 21/Waterfront

It looks like Nippon Maru, only blurrier.

I followed the crowd out of the station, along the sidewalk, and up an escalator to a raised walkway with slidewalks heading towards a tall building (this was the Landmark Tower, Japan's tallest building). From the walkway, I could see a huge ferris wheel, which I thought I recognized from a photo one of my co-workers had shown me. I wondered if perhaps they'd ever got out to this part of Yokohama. From the walkway, I could see the Nippon Maru. It didn't look very Japanese. It looked like a Western tall ship, but with more orange paint than a Westerner might normally use. I skipped down some stairs from the elevated walkway until I was on the ground, down some more stairs until I was on a sort of cement wharf surrounding the ship.

Not that I could get to the ship right then. It wouldn't open until 10:00. I'd arrived with the morning commuters, and even after I'd wandered around to look at the ship from different angles, it was just a little after 9:00. Maybe it was time for breakfast.

I made my way over to the Landmark Tower, entered, and headed for the basement, which of course had a mall to serve all those commuters I'd arrived with. Not many restaurants--there was a Vie de France, but surely I could do better than that. I started mallwalking. There was a Wendy's. Maybe I wouldn't be able to do better than Vie de France. I kept going. I noticed some signs indicating that I was underneath the Pan Pacific Hotel.

The Pan Pacific Hotel--this was the place where my co-workers were staying. I looked at my watch. It was after 9:00. They were probably all in Ofuna by now, suffering through meetings. I considered going up and confirming this at the front desk, tried to estimate how much trouble I'd have communicating with the desk staff, all to confirm that everyone who I might want to talk to had been gone for an hour. I chickened out.

It was too bad I hadn't got there early enough to hook up with them. Later on, they'd tell me about some interestingly historic Yokohama drydock that I missed completely. Who would think that their business hotel would turn out to be right in the middle of the Maritime tourist district?

I slunk back to Vie de France, had some pastry and coffee. It was still plenty early, so I headed outside and started walking Southeast along the waterfront. I crossed a couple of small bridges, walking among blossoming cherry blossom trees. I was here at the tail end of hanami. "Hana" means flower, and "Mi" means look. Hanami is the season for looking at cherry blossoms. "Hana" can also mean nose. I wondered if my cold would turn my Hanami into a sort of Nose-watching season. I was tired of being sick.

I looked back towards the Nippon Maru area. There were some miniature buildings by the water. I knew them. How could I know them? I'd never been here. Had my co-workers taken pictures of them?

Or was it Alex? Had Alex, who I'd known since high school, shown me and the high school chums photos of those miniature buildings? Hadn't Alex talked about going to some new area of Yokohama, talked excitedly about how modern it was? This was a new development, the Minato Mirai 21. I would soon come to loathe the number of new developments I'd see with "21" in their names, ushering in the 21st century with big multi-building developments. Had Alex mentioned a Maritime museum? Was he interested in those? He was in the US Navy, but that didn't mean that he thought about old boats on his vacations.

I kept walking, first through a business park, then through city streets, past the Customs house, until I reached the International Pier. There was a building there with an observation deck, so I went up and observed for a while. Yokohama's port was bustling, so I spent happy minutes watching boat traffic through coin-op binoculars.

What's that metal fence doing between me and the entrance?

On my way back to the Nippon Maru, I saw a sign for another Maritime museum--the NYK Maritime Museum. A freight company's own museum? I was intrigued. Maybe I could learn some Japanese words for talking about intermodal freight. I followed the signs down an alley. The alley turned out to be a dead end, blocked off by a large metal gate. On the gate was a small piece of paper, announcing that the museum would be closed 4/10-4/14. It was going to be closed for the duration of my stay in the area. My shoulders slumped. There was a noise behind me, a footstep.

Two Japanese tourists walked up. I moved out of the way of the little sign so that they could see it. They made some disappointed noises. The tourists and I tried to be sympathetic with one another, but my knowledge of conversational Japanese, which had never advanced far, had atrophied into insignificance. We used the word hima (free time) a lot, but I never figured out whether we were agreeing that we were travelers with free time, or that the museum people were taking some free time.

Nippon Maru/Yokohama Maritime Museum

On the Nippon Maru, I had a good time. I didn't learn much. It was like any old Western tall ship. It seemed like all the sailing terms were phonetic renderings of words I already knew. "furaingu jibu hariyado" wasn't so exotic when decoded to "flying jib halyard." I wasn't sure what a "gerun" was supposed to be, but I guessed that the answer wouldn't give me any great insight onto the history of Japanese sailing.

On the Nippon Maru there was a photo of shipboard cooks cooking while on rough waters.

To the Japanese, perhaps an old Western ship was more exotic than an old Japanese ship would have been. But where were the old Japanese ships? Surely there must be restorations somewhere?

There was a photo of sailors-in-training learning celestial navigation in a class. They were learning it the Western way. In the photo, you could see the class' blackboard On the blackboard, there were star names, the Western names, phonetically spelled out in katakana. Hadn't they had their own navigation methods, their own names for those stars? Maybe the isolated Japanese needed to learn celestial navigation from Western texts. In their isolation, maybe they'd never got far enough from land to need fancy navigation.

There was the maritime museum. Inside, there were displays with questions and answers about the Minato Mirai 21 land development project. If I'd understood their Japanese, no doubt my cynicism towards real estate developers would have received an unneeded boost. There were models of large ships, interactive displays about the port, none of which I understood. They discussed modern things, things not unique to Yokohama. Why was I here?

(I didn't take this photo in Yokohama, but several days later in Takamatsu.) Intermodal freight is smaller in Japan than in the USA. This makes sense; the trucks are smaller.

There was one unique-ish thing--a diorama of the coming of the black ships. I noticed that one of the ships was the Vandalia. Heh. Western barbarians. At a video display, I learned that a はしけ ("Hashike") is a barge, while a タグボート ("tagu bo-to") is a tugboat. There was a five minute multimedia presentation on intermodal freight which I could not follow. There was yet another display about the Minato Mirai 21 development. Was it that interesting; that controversial? I moved through, disheartened at my lack of comprehension.

弁財船 ("Bezaisen") was a word for a kind of Japanese sailing vessel. That was a good thing to learn. (Except that I also see the word "Benzaisen", with an extra "n" around in various places. So maybe I don't know that word as well as I thought I did.)

I learned that Yokohama is a sister city of Oakland, California. Hey, way to go Oakland. Also Vancouver, Shanghai, Melbourne, Dalian, and Hamburg. I wondered if this meant that Oakland and, say, Dalian were sister cities.

There was a gift store. I picked up a Japanese book on knots so that I could learn some Japanese knots. (There are such things.) I picked up a Japanese book on sailing; later, I would discover that it was about Western sailing.

I had a good time at these places, don't get me wrong. But I didn't learn much.

Outside again, my attention was arrested by a beverage vending machine. It was selling something called "Crystal Black" coffee. The last time I'd been in Japan, it had been winter, and I'd been happy to learn of these machines that sold hot cans of coffee. The coffee hadn't been good, but it had been nice to put hot cans into my coat pockets to warm up my hands. The main problem with the vended coffee was that it came with lots of milk, lots of sugar. Now here was a can of coffee without those pollutants. I bought, drank some. It was quite serviceable.

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