| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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I am really afraid that with falling educational standards in this country he may well be right. It would be nice for Holywood to get back to films where the interesting effects are in the writing just like it would be nice to get back to music where the effects are created by the composer and not the technology, but I see neither in the offing. There is both a falling supply and a falling demand for good writing and composing. It is easy to decide we want another SPACE JAM and turn the crank to get it. You cannot say next year we will have another film like A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. If you try to turn the crank for that you will fail miserably.
4:30:00 PM Dinner was a light meal of roast beef. Probably the last we will have at least until the trip home. Beef is very expensive in Japan and quite possibly is a real treat for the Japanese passengers. Given the choice of red meat or chicken I will almost always take chicken. It bothers me that a fellow mammal died for my meal. On the other hand I am willing to eat the meat if it is served to me since if the steer had to die, it seems more ethical to eat than to go hungry and eat more chicken as a result. I know that is weird. I guess that I feel that humans have a right to eat meat, having descended from meat-eaters but it is better to do it as ethically as possible and if you have the strength to be a vegetarian, that is a higher level of virtue. This is a fairly common religious argument I have. Anyone who is going to try to convert me to their religion will have to show me that their religion says that it is better to be a vegetarian than a meat-eater. And I say this as a meat eater. But thent I don't believe that meat-eating is a sin. It is interesting that most religions seem to think of virtue as a lack of sin. It is just easier for them to deal only with the negative. That may seem obscure, but if you deal only in the negative you don't have the moral compass to say it is better to give 20% of your salary to charity than to give 10%. There is nothing wrong with giving 10% but it is better to give 20%. It is not a sin to eat meat, but it is morally better not to. That is my point of view. Hey, you gonna read my log, you are going to read about my experience and some of that is going to be my thinking about theology. I guess I am an agnostic myself, but that doesn't mean I don't think about religion and ethics a lot.
Well we will land in about 40 minutes. We will have been in the process of travel for 22 hours. I would expect that we should be to Kimi Ryokan by 9 PM. That is just a guess on how long it will take us once we are on the ground and probably a high guess at that. 26 hours of travel should suffice. It must be something like 17 hours in the air. The sun that has been up for about 21 and a half hours is finally setting. Our first view of the Land of the Rising Sun will be with the sun setting. Real soon now the pre-defined part of our trip will end and we have to start navigating.
Well, we landed. We chose the slowest of the three queues at immigration. I switched to another queue and we got through a little faster. Customs was a wave-through. Evelyn exchanged our limit at the ATM and we exchanged a little more at a window. The rate is about 110 yen to the dollar. That makes it relatively easy to figure prices since a yen is a bit less than a penny. There was a stiff breeze from inside the office and Evelyn had a travelers cheque blown onto the floor. We got tickets for the Keisei line, a train much like New York's subways but much cleaner and with velveteen seats. The floor is not spotless, but there is no litter and it is a good two paces between specs of dirt. It is very different from New York's. It makes you wonder how barbaric and dirty New York must look to these people. Across the way two teen-aged girls are talking. One has bought stuffed animals of Tigger and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. We are in the last car which we just barely made. At one end of the car is, I guess you would call him an engineer in a uniform. White gloves and a cap with a flat top. We get views of the streets with neon signs at first, then we get into neighborhoods where there are not many lights. This will be more interesting in the daylight. There seem to be more readers here than in a New York subway.
We will be on this train nearly an hour, then another one, then we have to stop at a police station to ask for a map. This is not a fast form of transport. We are some distance out but we found a place that is reasonable in price, not easy to do. Most places would be $100/night and up. We are staying at the Kimi Ryokan in Ikebukuro. There were recommendations on the net.
It is surprising how busy everything is, even at night in Tokyo. We arrived in Tokyo and bought a ticket for the train to Ikebukuro. Here it is 8 at night and we are fighting a flood of people running in the other direction to make a train. I mean a lot of them literally running. You don't generally see Americans putting that much effort in. A seller on the side is playing Elvis Presley singing 'I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.' There seems to be a chain of kiosks in the train stations called 'Let's Kiosk.' It features brands of gum like 'Black Black' and 'Etiquette.' The local trains have silent TV screens with pictures of nature, weather reports, and, of course, ads. The train in from Narita had paper ads like our subways, but no TV screens. I wish I could read more of the language. One ad featured pictures of stone dolls. It may have been an ad for family planning. The stone dolls apparently are commemoratives of stillborn children and aborted fetuses. To the religions of the world there are three kinds of souls. There are the Born, the Stillborn, and the Born Again.
People on the trains were helpful in volunteering information, unasked, trying to help us find our destination.
Even with instruction we had trouble finding police station where we were told to ask about how to find the Ryokan. There were maps left by the Kimi people with explicit instructions. We found the Kimi and checked in.
It is a bit of an exaggeration for the Kimi to call itself a Ryokan. A Ryokan is generally a small and expensive inn in the country featuring beautiful scenery. Kimi does not ffer food, and food and tea service are very much a part of the Ryokan experience. It does offer free green tea at any time of the day. The room is a traditional tatami room, but with not much in it but a tatami (a woven straw mat covering the floor) and two futons (basic bed rolls) and one wooden table. The room is tiny and has space for perhaps one more futon. (That is, the futons take up 2/3 of the room). You don't get much for 7500 yen a night. At the current rate of exchange that is about $68. You leave your shoes on a shelf by the door and you are given on loan one small towel and a bathrobe.
There is a plastic stick on the key and you must put that in a slot or the one light, a ceiling fluorescent, will not come on. Hence, if you take the keys with you the light has been turned off.
There is a traditional Japanese bath available, though most people will probably use the showers on the floor. There is one toilet shared by the eight or so rooms on the floor. The toilet is Western-style. The room has no wastebasket and no mirror.
Evelyn went to sleep about 10, I stayed up organizing and writing till about 11:30.
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10/08/96 Tokyo: Museums: Japan Explaining Itself to Itself
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I woke up once, fully rested, and looked at my watch. 1:24 AM. I went back to sleep. The second time I woke up was 5:18. That is a little earlier than home, not much.
I brought a short-wave, but early morning it is hard to find much. There were two AM stations, no FM at all, Even on the short-wave bands there is not much. (P.S. I later found out this was not greatly different any time of day. Japan just is not very big on radio stations. There is American Armed Forces radio with a lot of rock music, and all the other stations seem to be in Japanese and are only talk.)
You get one towel per person when you check in and it is small, about 8'x24'. The bathroom is tiny, a urinal and a claustrophobic stall and there is no lock on the outer door. The toilet is much like one we would have at home but the seat is thin plastic and the tank has a sort of basin at the top. Our toilets fill with the water source on the inside, this one fills from the outside with an inverted U shaped faucet like we used to have in chemistry lab. So when You flush the toilet you actually see the water go into the tank. I suppose this could be to clean your hands. The toilet paper is not as bad as I had read, but it does tend to tear at unfortunate moments. It is unperforated, by the way. You are not supposed to let your feet touch the floor of a bathroom. With a traditional toilet that is more important, but the precaution is also applied here. There are a pair of slippers on the floor, several sizes too big for anyone and they become small and portable clean flooring. Almost the same idea was used in the Walkman. A Walkman is a sound system that is made cheap, small, and portable by making it for one. Bathroom slippers are carpeting that is made cheap, small, and portable by making it for one. Of course being seen wearing these specially marked slippers out of the bathroom is a major social faux pas.
Our first day in Japan is rainy and a little ugly. We will carry umbrellas and go to museums today.
One of the common features of Ryokans are green tea. The real Ryokans have a maid to serve it. Kimi has made the accommodation to have a room with a tea dispenser. In this room various people, meet and talk. It is sort of the recreation room. We stopped in and talked for a while with a man who had come here many times since W.W.II, though usually he avoids Tokyo and stays with friends. He recommended a place to stay in Kyoto that is along similar lines as the Kimi. According to him, finding a place as inexpensive and clean as the Kimi is very rare. The hotel situation here must be ruinous for a lot of travelers. He seems to think that we will likely see a lot of rain but not much at any one time. Today is the first real rainy day in weeks. Our informant tells us that it rains frequently, but it is usually just a bit a day.
He was able to pass on a recommendation for a place to stay in Kyoto. He said that he had recommended it to someone else and they had found it in their tour book. We decided to see if it was in the Lonely Planet book. (Lonely Planet is a series of popular guidebooks.) Well it turned out he had not known about the Lonely Planet books, but that was the book where he'd seen the place mentioned. So we found it and may well reserve it.
After having the tea and talk we headed out to Ueno Park to see the museums. Now let me make this clear. What we saw at the train station was the tail end of rush hour. It was probably mild compared to the height of rush hour and probably minor compared to other stations. It still was a fairly impressive tide of people. I have seen places where you took your life in your hands crossing traffic where that traffic was cars, I have seen it where it was bicycles, this was the fist time I have seen my life threatened by pedestrians. This was a real flood of people. It is hard to believe what a populous place this really is, but when You get his many people rushing to work you have a formidable force. If you have to cross this tide of people, good luck to you.
The train, these are really elevated trains where we are. They are crowded by US standards but not as bad as the ones you see pictures of where there are hired people to shove people inside so the doors can close. Of course these are elevated because otherwise they would have been out of reach and could not dangle from Gojira's mouth in the famous poster. |
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