![[Photo: Toy buildings at DoCoMoTown]](pht_daiba_docomotown_bldg.jpg)
What could they have been thinking?
Wed Apr 12 2000 (ctd)
I got on the train back to Tokyo, sat down, and waited for it to start moving. The train didn't leave the station for several minutes. I spaced out for a while.
I snapped out of it. The train had departed, had gone a couple of stops. It had filled up--I was surrounded by people standing up. In fact, right in front of me was standing a little boy and his mom. This would never do. I stood up, gestured that the kid should take my seat. Mom protested, but I didn't understand what she was saying so I gestured again, said "Dozo," ("Go ahead.") moved away from the seat. She said something to the boy, presumably, "What do you tell the nice man?" and he said "Domo arigato-". ("Thank you.") And I forgot how to say "You're welcome." So I smiled and didn't say anything. What a jerk I must have seemed. Did the boy understand that I might not know what to say?
When I stood up, I was able to see that there was another seat free. The boy could have sat down without my interference. I'd created a scene for no good reason. I was a doofus. Then I remembered, "Do itashimashite." That was "You're welcome" in Japanese, rather later than I needed it.
A while later, kid and mom were ready to go. Mom pulled at my sleeve and said, in English, "Thank you for your kindness." I gaped as she spun around and started to walk away. "Y- you're welcome." I said to her disappearing back.
It was at around this time that my morning decongestant wore off. I'd brought more with me. Back at the Tokyo-area Shibuya station, I had another pill. These decongestants were not the non-drowsy kind. They were the drowsy kind. I'd been up since 5:30 AM. I don't know why I bring all of this up, except maybe to point out that maybe I should be glad that I didn't get into more trouble than I did in the Daiba area.
My next planned site was Tokyo's Museum of Maritime Science. I'd found out about its existence from the helpful people at San Francisco's JNTO office. I'd asked them about maritime museums, said that I was interested in old boats. So they gave me some information about this place. The problem was the directions to get there:
"15 min. by bus from JR Shinagawa Sta., 30 min. by boat from Hinode Pier or 15 min. by Yurikamome (New Transport) from JR and Subway Shimbashi Station."
They had the place's street address, which wasn't much help to me. I had a copy of Kodansha's Tokyo City Atlas (A Bilingual Guide). I'd spent a lot of time that morning trying to figure out how far "30 min. by bus" might be. I'd found the route of the "Yurikamome", and was tracing its route--Omigawsh, it was heading out to some strange little islands in the bay. That couldn't be right. I tried looking for "Higashi Yashio" (the museum's district) on the map, but needn't have bothered--the museum itself was on the map.
In fact, it was in the Atlas' index. If I'd thought to check that sooner, I could have saved myself an hour of my life.
And so I exited the Shimbashi station looking for the Yurikamome train system. I walked along the sidewalk to a large covered stairway with a canopy reading "Yurikamome". I walked towards it. There were people in "Yurikamome" jackets yelling something. No doubt they were singing its praises, handing out tissues.
One guy seemed to be saying negative things. He was watching me as I walked, and was saying, "something something-masen." Something was not something. He continued: "something-nai something". Something was not something. I stopped.
All those people on the stairway--they were all exiting, walking down towards me, towards the sidewalk. I started paying more attention to what the guy was saying, and eventually caught on: this was an exit, not an entrance. I walked up to him and asked him, "Yurikamome noriba wa, dochira ga ii desuka?", a rough rendering of, "Ugh, Yurikamome, ugh, which way, ugh, good?" Tarzan the ape-tourist, that was me. He marched me around the corner of a construction site and pointed me in the right direction, told me to go a couple of blocks. And he was right.
The Yurikamome was small and cramped and crowded, like a 75% scale-model of a real streetcar. We moved over a large construction site--no doubt some multi-block land development. For an instant, between a bridge and an overpass, there was a view of sailboats, and then that was gone and it was construction again. And then we started to gain some altitude, and there were views of the bay. It was perhaps not so bustling as that around Yokohama, yet there was still plenty going on. The Museum of Maritime Science is at the Fune-no-Kagakukan stop. I noticed that the next train was "Telecon Senta" "Telecom Center". Hmm.
I was working at Blue Mug. I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say about what we had contracted to do. It was a contract through another company, and that contract was with a major Japanese electronics manufacturer. That manufacturer wanted to manufacture a W-CDMA mobile telephone; but first they needed to develop such a phone. I'd spent quite a lot of the previous few years keeping up with the state of Japanese mobile phones.
Anyhow, it seemed like a good idea to go to "Telecom Center", so I stayed on for another stop. I hadn't been able to figure out the Yurikamome ticket machines, so I was pretty sure I was going to have to add fare to my ticket anyhow.
I exited the tiny Yurikamome car, and took a moment to stretch. I was really far too large for the Yurikamome. I paid the rest of my fare and walked across a walkway to the Telecom center, two tall office buildings joined by a bridge on the 20th floor, which turned out to be the publicly-accessible telephone-related part of the Telecom Center: DoCoMo Town.
NTT DoCoMo is, of course, the big Japanese mobile telephone company. And mobile phones are big business over there. And here I was looking at a sign that advertised DoCoMo Town, a sign festooned with cartoonish anthropomorphic mobile phones. And so I entered the Telecom Center, rode the elevator to the 20th floor, walked down a hall.
Half of the bridge between buildings was taken up by DoCoMo Town. On the other side of the bridge was a room full of ping-pong tables, a place which had been set up as a place for teenagers to hang out instead of getting into trouble on the streets. I wonder if DoCoMo hoped that these teenyboppers would occasionally walk across the hall to find out what wonderful phones were being targeted at their market.
![[Photo: Anthropomorphic phone sells brethren into slavery]](pht_daiba_docomotown_chara.jpg)
If so, DoCoMo seemed to be aiming their market materials a bit low. Inside DoCoMo town were four kids who looked about eight years old. There were multi-player arcade games, but each game featured anthropomorphic mobile phones as protagonists. The games didn't look like much fun, but they were free, and that was enough for these kids. The "town" seethed with forced fun. It was mostly furnished with model buildings, distorted things that looked like scale models of office buildings from ToonTown. There were plush models of the mobile phone characters, ceramic models of them. There were displays of newish mobile phones. There was a display about the future of mobile phones, and it seemed to be about W-CDMA.
It was the product of dementia. I was hoping for a flagship store, but there was all of this kiddie stuff around. Had I missed the sign for the real store? Still, there were an awful lot of displays around, a lot of market literature. I was glad to be there, but it didn't make me want to buy anything.
I made my way down and out into the air and started walking back towards the Museum of Maritime Science. I walked past an open field in which a bird was singing beautifully. It was a large open field in the middle of a business park. "Sing as loud as you can, little birdie," I thought, "Your nest's days are numbered." There was a nice view of some loading gantries, but a fence kept me from getting too close. I walked through a waterfront park in which no birds sang, past a couple of restored boats, and found myself at the Museum of Maritime Science.
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