Departures: Land of the Rising Sun: Part 6

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Fri Apr 14 2000 (ctd)

The museum only seemed to have one exhibit open to the public that day, but it was a pretty good exhibit: the 20th century in photos, mostly newspaper photos. I took notes about which incidents were considered worthy of inclusion.

There was a photo of the Fukuryumaru #5 out of Shizuoka. This ship was exposed to radiation as a result of one of Bikini Atoll tests, though it was out of what was then thought to be the danger zone. (Thanks to these tests, we now have a better idea of what the danger zone is.)

For the later years of the century, they generally had more than one photo per year, but they had no photos for 1992, the year of my previous visit. I wondered if I should send them one of my snapshots, maybe the picture of the Hello Kitty popcorn vending machine.

Indecision, Decision

There was just one exhibit open, and it didn't take long. Suddenly I was done and it was still early. I sat down outside the museum and ate a little lunch, squinting into the wind. Lots of gaijin walked past; I could have been in San Francisco. I decided to ride the Yamanote train line to the main Tokyo station, visit the Tourist Information Center and try and figure out some way to spend the rest of the day. On the train, I looked at the system map and saw that I'd be going through Shimbashi, whence I'd caught the Yurikamome. I thought of those sailboats I'd glimpsed. I decided to hunt them afoot. To heck with the TIC.

I emerged from Shimbashi station, into hot sticky air and glare. I located the Yurikamome, and decided to walk along its course, underneath its elevated tracks. However, there was a huge construction project in the way, fenced off. I tried going around it clockwise and found myself in a dead-end alley with fence on one side an old warehouse on the other. The dead end forced me to stop walking, and I finally paused to take a look around. I noticed that the sky was not blue, not exactly gray, but more white. I noticed that my throat was irritated. Was this Tokyo smog?

I'd read about Tokyo smog. I'd read about oxygen shops that sold breathable air. Nothing I'd read had told me how to find an oxygen shop. I made my way counter-clockwise around the construction site, marvelling at the sky's strange color. I remembered my view of Mt Fuji from my previous trip, how orange it had looked as I saw its snow-covered sides through a wall of smog. I thought Calm down, it's only a little poison. You've handled worse.

A sign on the construction site's fence said something-21-something. Probably something about the 21st century. All hail progress, I thought, 100 years ago, it maybe smelled worse than this.

A Boat in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush

I came to a complicated intersection. A few streets met at odd angles. There were islands; there were crossing signals to get halfway across, then other signals to complete one's journey; there was a pedestrian overpass. But beyond it, there was an area with clear airspace, and there I saw sailboat masts. I was at the right place. It only took a few minutes to figure out the crossing lights and make my way across the intersection to the North corner of Hama-Rikyu--Teien, a garden surrounded by canals. In the canal on its Northeast shore, sailboats were moored. The tenants of the buildings across the street apparently didn't want to look at the sailboats; a high wall was in place between the street and the boats, but from a bridge close to the garden, I had a good view.

Sailboats. No really, they're back there. You can sort of see the tops of the masts. Hey, give me a break. None of the other photos turned out.

There were maybe 10 of them. It occurred to me that I'd had a pretty good view of the harbor from the Yurikamome, but I hadn't seen any sailboats. Where were they all? I looked at my map, saw that the garden was surrounded by canals, and decided to go around it. I walked past the gate to the garden, while people watched me with worried expressions: did the foreigner realize that he was blithely walking past the entrance to this tourist attraction?

In the Southeast canal, there were more sailboats, again far away. I wanted to get closer. There was private property next to the canal, but my map implied that the road might curve around and get closer, so I followed it. I walked along the street, looking to my left for a clear way to the canal on my and saw the top of a mast of a tall ship to my right, towering over some mall.

A mast that's just stuck in the ground. Belaying pins that aren't belaying anything. A yellow sign I didn't understand and a smaller sign telling me that skateboarding was prohibited. What an ugly, uninviting plaza.

I got closer and found that the mast was, in fact, in the mall, in a sort of courtyard. There was no ship under it, just the ground. I walked up some stairs, hoping to get a nice camera angle on the mast, and found myself on a sort of boardwalk with a view of the harbor. I spent some happy minutes there looking at harbor activity and hanging from a coin-op binocular. This boardwalk is for people who are boarding tour ferries and dinner cruises and found myself surrounded by tourists.

I wonder about tourists who come to San Francisco. Of the people who flock to Fisherman's Wharf, there must be some who hope to see fishing boats, seafood. There must be some people who find the t-shirt shops a distraction; what do they think of their fellow tourists who came all this way to buy a souvenir pelican statuette made from seashells?

I had come all this way to find out what was under that mast and it was a tourist trap like any other.

So I left.

Next to a hotel, there was a street which got close to the canal, and thus I got close to the canal, got a closer view of those sailboats. Maybe a couple dozen of them, not many. If Tokyo land prices are so expensive, if you have to be rich to live there, why not spring some leftover money for a sailboat?

Maybe there were so many fisherfolk in Japan that boating is something for hoi polloi?

Watery Adventure at Toyosu Park

I didn't want to believe that. I dragged out my map, started scanning it for a place that looked like a yacht harbor. All the shore looked straight, free of nooks and crannies and shelter. Finally, I saw something that looked like it might be some piers. Next to it was Toyosu Park. Maybe that was a little marina area?

And so I ignored the warm poison in my lungs, ignored the warm haze through which I moved, and started walking. Back around Hama-Rikyu--Teiei, past Tokyo's main fish market (much too late in the day to be interesting), past the National Cancer Center where a crossing guard gave me a gesture which probably meant stop or go but I wasn't sure which (so I went), across a couple of high-traffic bridges (don't think about poison), past another large construction project named after the 21st century (during this walk, I became sick of these), across another bridge, past some shipping companies (which were surrounded by fences), along a path surrounded by cherry trees (seeming out of place as they were in turn surrounded by fences and shipping companies), and to Toyosu Park (which wasn't a yacht harbor at all). At the park, I could see that the piers on my map were part of some shipping company's complex, and not anything I could get to.

The fuzzy green lines are my annotations. The original map is from Kodansha's Tokyo City Atlas (A Bilingual Atlas)

The park had a playground, a baseball field, tennis courts, some benches. There were a couple of kids with their mother, an old guy sitting on a bench, a bum lying on another bench, a couple smooching on yet another bench. There was a drinking fountain which squirted me in the face with an unexpectedly large amount of water and didn't stop even when I, surprised, let go of its knob. In water-conserving California, if you let go of a drinking fountain knob, it springs back to the stoppered position. This is not the system at Toyosu park: the water came out fast and kept coming. I jerked my face back and the fountain of water went straight up into the air, past my head, and fell back down to fall upon my shirt. Eventually, I got control, reduced the flow to something manageable, drank deep.

I was pretty wet, though.

The small children had seen this, they had been looking right at me as it happened, but they did not laugh. I can't imagine why not. I decided not to walk back, instead going to a nearby subway station. As I walked down the stairs, still dripping water from my upper extremities, a lady walking up saw me and smiled, barely suppressed a laugh. I still can't figure out what was wrong with those kids.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Most of the machines at the coin laundry were pretty modern, but there were two old ones with bright semi-see-through plastic. They had sylistically predicted the age of the iMac.

Back in my hotel room, I was feeling pretty sleepy, so I decided to take a nap. Then I remembered that if I took a nap, I might not wake up until 3.A.M., so I didn't. I grabbed my dirty clothes and the still-damp clothes I'd washed before and headed out of the hotel a block West to a coin laundry. I did laundry and sat around and read the start of Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was full of wonderful, wonderful English.

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