Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part 0

April 10-22, 2000, I vacationed in Japan.

No Boy Scout

I didn't intend to go in unprepared.

• While I was still in San Francisco, I got plenty of Japanese currency. During my previous trip to Japan, I'd spent a lot, had run low on cash. I wasted half a day of my time (and my friends' time) visiting banks to get cash. I wanted to make sure that didn't happen again.
  
  (In the nine years between my excursions, many Japanese businesses had learned to accept credit cards. There were ATM cash machines around. Things had changed.)
• I was very brave. I ate sushi in San Francisco. I'd been a vegetarian for a few years, but was worried about my ability to get healthy food in Japan. I'd decided to try fish. This was a scary experiment. I'd tried some meat a few months before, and the result had been a gastric disaster. The sushi experiment revealed that I could eat fish. It was yucky, but it wouldn't rankle my gizzard.
  
  (In Japan, I got sufficient protein from eggs. I had fish a couple of times, but I probably needn't have bothered.)
• I'd read the relevant parts of my guidebook, sort of. I'd made an itinerary, sort of. The planning hadn't gone well. I wanted to be in Asagaya, a town on the outskirts of Tokyo, on Friday April 14. My friend Jimmy was living in Asagaya, but was leaving soon. He and his fiancee, Min Jung, were going to get married and travel. Friday, they were throwing a party in Asagaya. I just had to figure out what to do with the rest of my trip. At first I'd planned to go to Hokkaido, to the North. On my previous trip I'd gone South, so North would be new. Some of my co-workers would be around; they liked to snowboard in Hokkaido.
  
  Then my guidebook convinced me that Northern Japan would not be to my liking. There was a lot of natural splendor. I'd already seen Japan's best gorge, and hadn't been too impressed. So I changed my plan: I would go to the island of Shikoku instead of Hokkaido. Once I started looking at my guidebook's descriptions of places on Shikoku, there were all kinds of interesting things to do.
  
  I sketched out an ambitious list of things to do. (I would accomplish very few of these things.)
• I tried to make a reservation at an Asagaya hotel. I remembered how tough it had been to figure out lodgings when I first arrived in Japan. Speaking a foreign language is tough after a few hours on an airplane. This time I planned ahead, did a web search, found a hotel reservation service that offered reservations at the Hotel Sky Court Asagaya. I filled out their form; I waited for the confirmation email; it never arrived. The reservation service, perhaps to keep me from trying to bypass them, didn't give any contact information for the hotel.
  
  (I went in without a reservation.)
• I didn't bring an ace bandage.
  
  (I don't know what I could have been thinking.)

• In the few days before the trip, I did just about everything except pack and prepare. It felt like I was preparing. Getting that cash, testing shoes for walkability, getting socks for those shoes, shopping for a wedding present, visiting a museum exhibit of modern Japanese textiles: all this seemed important at the time. I stayed out late to watch Sandpit play at the Hotel Utah. I do not regret this. When my cousin Ellen Bradburn and her friend Polly wanted to stroll around Berkeley with my parents, I tagged along. I do not regret this.
  
  Somehow all this activity resulted in me getting worn out and catching the world's worst case of the common cold two days before my trip. I was worried that my sinuses would explode when the airplane hit high altitude. I was worried about drowning in a river of mucus.
  
  (Maybe I should have used my time differently.)
• The day before my scheduled flight, I drank orange juice, consumed vitamin C, drank liquids, ate garlic, got plenty of rest.
  
  (I observed my cold worsen.)
• Monday morning, I realized I still had some space left in my suitcase, so I tossed in some more underwear and shirts.
  
  (During my trip, I would not need these extra clothes (but I would carry them).)
• Bags in hand, I lingered over my houseplants, telling them that they should rest in peace after they died, and that I was glad that they weren't animals. I hoped that all those people who said that plants had feelings--I hoped those people were wrong. I was going to be gone for two weeks. These plants were going to die.
  
  (When I returned, those plants would be looking better than ever. (I'd been watering them too often.))

• I was braced for lots of Japanese people to say of me, behind my back, その 外人 は せい が 高い ですね。 ("Sono gaijin wa, sei ga takai, desu ne?") ("That foreigner sure is tall.")
  
  (It didn't happen. Things had changed.)

Japan was different this time around. But it was mostly the same.

Getting to Asagaya: Easier than Alamogordo

Mon Apr 10 2000

Rode the streetcar, like any Monday morning. It was not quite rush hour, so there was plenty of room for me and my baggage; another half hour and things might have been dicey.

Onto CalTrain; in the seat behind me, a lady talked to her dad by celphone, explaining that his birthday present would be a mountain bike (all this still in English).

Quick jitney to the airport.

On the plane, the seat beside mine was empty, and I extended long legs and catnapped the way. Though the sun never set, Tuesday snuck up on me. When I filled out the quarantine form, I forgot to mention my cold.

At Narita airport, I caught the Narita Express train into town. Out the window, I saw the whole rural Japan thing: fields, roads, drab towns with tile roofs. My fellow passengers had a startling array of mobile phones.

At Shinjuku station, I had to ask a ticket collector to point me to the tracks of Japan Rail's Chuo-Sobu line. I caught a Rapid, and it was one, two, three stops to Asagaya; I snuffled a lot, as did everyone else in Tokyo. It was not quite rush hour, so there was plenty of room for me and my baggage; another half hour and things might have been dicey.

At Asagaya station, I tried to exit the station through the wrong door; the anguished guard was almost too upset to point me to the right one, but eventually succeeded.

I walked parallel to the elevated tracks until I found the entrance to the Hotel Sky Court Asagaya. They had a room, soon I took the elevator to the fifth floor, found the room, dumped the bags and I was in in in.

Am I Ready?

Tue Apr 11 2000

I stepped out. Wandering the narrow streets of Asagaya, I started to realize how much I'd forgotten, that there might be consequences. I looked at a skinny sign hanging on the door of a restaurant. The sign showed three kanji (pictograms). I was sure that this sign meant that the restaurant was open or closed. I wasn't sure which, though.

Nevertheless, I figured I would be fine. Open or closed, at least I was able to find restaurants. The neighborhood seemed to be chock-full of restaurants and little bars. It was amazing. Who patronized all of these places? Did all the sarariman (salarymen) totter off the trains and linger at these places before going home? The bars seemed to outnumber the homes. Were all Tokyo suburbs like this?

I remembered the Osaka suburb which I knew only as its train stop name, Soji-ji. Next to its train station, there had been a cigarette stand, maybe a couple of restaurants. Asagaya seemed to have a square klick of entertainment district.

I headed back to my hotel room. Attached to my room key was a plastic fob which enabled the room's lights. I had to leave the key in a special socket if I wanted the lights to work. Fortunately, the desk clerk had explained this to me, otherwise I would have been left in the dark. (I would run into this system in other places later, with clerks who were less ready to talk to foreigners, and would be glad I knew the score.) The quilt on the bed was of some strange, slick fabric. It looked stain-resistant, as if any stainy thing would roll right off of it and onto the floor. I tried not to think about why that would be useful.

View from my hotel room window. Scenic, ne?

I looked out the window. There were the train tracks, perhaps 4m from my window. There was the train station; my window looked right out on the platform; and the platform, in turn, looked right in through my window. I closed the curtains. I ate some diem sum that I'd brought from San Francisco. I showered. I sat down.

The tracks were right outside, nothing between them and the hotel. They were elevated tracks, and this was an elevated room; each to an equal extent. Actually, the tracks were a little higher. I wondered if train noise would keep me awake. I didn't notice any train noise. I was abruptly asleep.

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