| Submitted by: Evelyn C. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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' These are members of several rock and roll clubs who dress up in old jeans or leather pants, long pointed shoes, leather jackets (which they took off because of the heat), and pompadour hairdos. They play old Fifties rock and roll on their cassette player and dance to it in classic overdone Fifties style. There are also a few young women in flared skirts and petticoats who dance rather more sedately (they don't fling themselves on the ground) and more in unison to such tunes as 'Let's Go to the Hop.'
We met another American couple here: he is stationed on the U.S. military base nearby and she is visiting him. She was saying she lives in a town in Nebraska with a population of about three hundred, and has never seen anything like this. (Doesn't she have television? Even so, I suppose you pretty much get only broadcast television in really small towns, and I don't think PBS has done a special on the performers of Harajuku yet. But it's a great idea.)
The other performers (there seemed to be far fewer than the books indicated) were some pretty bad singers, a reasonable punk mime, and a group of Hare Krishnas (well, they were performing).
We returned to the Kimi, stopping in Tobu about 17:30 to pick up sushi. It was really crowded at that hour, but there was still plenty of sushi. We got another huge amount of sushi for ¥1050, and picked up a liter of Coke to go with it. (I know, real gourmet.)
After dinner, I went down and soaked in the tub. First you wash yourself thoroughly, either under the shower (which didn't seem to work), or using the faucets outside the tub and rinsing off with a basin provided. Then when you're clean you take the cover off the tub and climb in. This tub was not very traditional-looking: it was basically a shorter, deeper bathtub. When you sit in it the water comes up to your neck. This had the temperature set at 42 degrees Centigrade (about 108 degrees Fahrenheit), which is actually pretty cool for a Japanese tub. After soaking in this for a while, my feet felt a lot better, and the rest of me felt a lot sleepier. In fact, when I got back to the room, I fell asleep for an hour or so, then wrote for a while, then went to sleep about 22:30, missing the group of rowdy Americans who came in about 23:30.
October 14, 1996: Some days the best you can say is that no one threw cow **** on your shoes.
But let me begin at the beginning.
Breakfast was again steamed buns.
We had two day trips planned from Tokyo, one to Hakone and one to Nikko. The Hakone one was primarily to see Mt. Fuji and involved taking trains, cable cars, and various other forms of transportation through a scenic area. In other words, we would be outside a lot and weather was critical. Since the morning looked relatively clear, and hardly anyone was carrying an umbrella, we figured this would be a good day for Hakone.
We tried to get tickets to Hakone (actually the town is Odawara; it's the gateway to Hakone National Park) at the window at Ikebukuro, but were unable to. Apparently you get tickets either at the Travel Service Bureau offices in the major stations (these are open mostly from 10:00 to 18:00) or at the station from which the train is leaving. In our case this was Tokyo Station. So we took the Yamanote line to Tokyo Station. Even though it was not rush hour yet, it was really packed, at least for the first few stops. However, it was not so packed that there were conductors pushing the people in. (By the way, to use the JapanRail Pass on the local trains, go through the gate for handicapped and special pass access. Even if these aren't marked, they're obvious: there's a man in a booth at one end of the row of automatic gates. Just show your pass, open so they can check the dates, though in Tokyo they didn't seem to care.)
In Tokyo Station we ended up getting on a local train rather than the Shinkansen (bullet train), because I didn't realize there were separate tracks for the Shinkansen. Make sure you look for those tracks if that's what you want.
At any rate, we got on the train and started out. The trip took about ninety minutes and was basically through city the entire way. There may have been brief stretches of countryside, but nothing like one sees in most countries. Japan is a very urban country.
The cities we were traveling through were not all gleaming buildings and neon, either. The buildings outside the city centers were mostly older and somewhat run-down. The vision many people have of the shining 21st century Japan may be true of parts of Tokyo, but it certainly is not the case everywhere. We see spotless factory interiors with robots assembling cars, but most of the factories look pretty much like factories everywhere, at least from the outside.
By now you've probably guessed that by the time we got to Odawara, it was raining. We debated what to do-was it worth doing the Hakone route in the rain? Given that it would be about US$40 each for all the transportation to do it, it didn't seem worthwhile if the main attraction, Mt. Fuji, was not even visible.
So what could we do? Well, we had covered most of what was in Tokyo itself, so we decided on what will undoubtedly seem to some like a bizarre course of action-we went to Nikko. This is bizarre because Odawara is southwest of Tokyo, and Nikko is northeast. So our plan involved returning to Tokyo Station (this time on the Shinkansen), taking the Yamanote Line to Ueno Station, having a quick lunch in a noodle shop and a quick look in a bookstore (where they had various American science fiction books in Japanese for about ¥410 each), taking the Shinkansen to Utsunomiya, and then taking a local train to Nikko. What with changing, etc., this took us from about 10:30 to 15:00. (That did include an hour in Ueno when we made seat reservations and had lunch.)
A few more notes about JR trains. The unreserved seats are in cars that are usually at the front but sometimes at the back. Look for the signs that have the characters for unreserved on them (three characters, the first a vertical rectangle divided into three horizontal slices with a little vertical line coming out of the center of the top, the second a similar rectangle divided into four parts with one vertical and one horizontal line, also with the little vertical line, and a third kanji character too complicated to describe). Alternatively, ask 'Juyiseki ka?' ('Is this unreserved?'). You can, of course, get reserved tickets ('shiteiseki'), but often these are sold out. With unreserved you may have to stand, but this didn't seem that common, particularly if you are getting on at the beginning of the route.
In Nikko we had the choice of walking uphill a half hour in the rain or taking a bus. We took the bus. We were worried that we would miss the stop (Shin-kyo Bridge), but it is 1) pretty obvious, and 2) announced in English. (The other stop announced in English is the train station on the return route.)
The bus is fairly straightforward; the fare is displayed electronically at the front by zone, and if you get on after the first zone you get a ticket at boarding that says where you got on. They require exact change, but they seem to be willing to make change from the next passenger's money if possible.
There is a legend connected with this spot, and so there was a famous bridge built here. But the old-looking bridge is actually a reconstruction of the original bridge (for which they still want ¥300 just to walk across it, and it's only about thirty meters). There is also a new bridge on which all the traffic goes and this you can walk over for free.
Across the bridge is Nikko National Park, containing two major shrines and a temple. Most people who come to Nikko go to all three, and they in fact sell a 'two-shrine-one-temple' ticket which saves you on admissions. The only catch is that this does not include Ieyasu's Tomb, though even if you pay the extra for that the combination ticket is a good deal-if you are going to all three sights. However, it was now 15:30 and last admissions were at 16:30 so the multiple ticket wouldn't have done us much good. This way we also had an excuse to skip a couple of sites we probably had less interest in anyway. (The admission to Tosho-gu Shrine, including Ieyasu's Tomb, is ¥1250. The combination ticket, not including the tomb, is ¥950, and the tomb is ¥500. I am not sure what the other shrine and the temple are now, but it's obviously worth the combination ticket.)
We climbed the path up to Toshu-gu Shrine. The rain had, surprisingly, stopped, but it was still very dim among the trees and the mist was rising off the mountains in a very atmospheric setting. The shrine and tomb are quite elaborate, with more ornamentation than most of the ones we have visited so far. Mark said there was a gate somewhere nicknamed the 'Looks All Day Gate' because you could spend all day looking at the carvings on it, and the main gate here may have been it. This shrine is also known for its carving of the three monkeys ('hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil'), though I doubt that they originated here.
Mark has undoubtedly given a complete history of Ieyasu Tokugawa in his log, so I will not repeat it here. I will say that he united Japan in 1603 and so Mark describes him as the 'Arthur of Japan.'
There is a long climb up stairs to Ieyasu's Tomb high among the cedars. This part of the shrine is referred to as the 'Sleeping Cat,' because there is a carving of a sleeping cat on the gate at the beginning of the stairs. There is, however, apparently no legend about this sleeping cat, not even for tourists, so you know it's a different culture. (I mean, most places would have some story about how when the cat wakes, Ieyasu will return to lead Japan again or some such.)
We finished here just about the time the shrine was closing (17:00), and naturally it started raining. Well, it had at least held off while we were at the shrine.
Because it was raining we decided to take the bus back to the station rather than walking. When we got to the station, it took us a few minutes to realize that it was not the JR station, but another station. By the time we got to the JR station (about a block away), we had just missed one train and had to wait almost an hour an a half for the next one. (This was, of course, the longest gap between trains of the day.) By the time we got back we were definitely tired.
Oh, and the cow shit? Well, in India boys run by you and throw cow **** on your shoes so an accomplice can come up and say, 'I saw that. There's a shop around the corner where you can get your shoes cleaned.' Okay, so this day wasn't that bad, and we did finally see something worth seeing. But we spent an extraordinary amount of time on the train and waiting around train stations to do it.
October 15, 1996: Our last day in Tokyo.
The weather this morning was clearer but still somewhat overcast in direction of Mt. Fuji, so rather than try Hakone again, we decided to try to see some of the mountain area around Matsumoto. (We were glad we hadn't planned on climbing Mt. Fuji.) We got to the departure station (Ueno) only to discover that there were no reserved seats left, so we queued up for the unreserved car and did get seats there, though not window seats (at least until well into the trip as people got off). The trip was almost three hours (on a limited express, not a Shinkansen), and went through a lot of tunnels as we climbed into the mountains. The scenery was beautiful, and we discovered that there are countryside and rural areas in Japan, something not at all obvious if one stays around Tokyo.
Arriving in Matsumoto about 12:00, we made return reservations so there would be no risk of having to stand for the three-hour trip back. We then looked for lunch. The Lonely guide Planet talked about the Matsumoto specialty, soba noodles with wasabi and soy, and recommended a restaurant, but the restaurant seemed to have changed owners (or at least names), and was now somewhat more upscale than we were hoping for (a small serving of plain noodles was ¥1000). |
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