Byodoin temple

On our last night in Kyoto, we took a train 30 minutes out to Uji, where our new friends Bill & Setsuko live. They had invited us over for dinner, and for a tour of Byodoin temple, which dates back to the 11th century. (At last! Something genuinely old that wasn't rebuilt in 1979 or 1923 or 1633. Or that we didn't destroy in World War II). This temple is featured on the 10 yen coin. Setsuko knows the history well, and she walked us around the temple grounds informing us of the many phases of the temple's history. Inside was a giant wooden Amida Buddha, over ten feet high, faded gold and carved by a master carver who influenced later representations of Buddha. Sofia was interested, and continues to talk about "Boo-doo" or "Boo-di," depending on her mood.

It was a nice break from the city. Uji was a peaceful town, and on a cold night, Setsuko prepared a delicious dish called "nabe" while we talked, a stew rich with noodles, rice, greens, shaved radishes, oysters and chicken. We also enjoyed steaming hot cups of roasted tea.

Again, the best part of our trip has been spending time with people who live here-- getting an insider's view on what is fascinating, wonderful, and frustrating about life here, as in any place, and trying to imagine what it would be like to live here. Especially in spending time with expatriates, I always picture the other cultures in which I've lived and traveled, and wonder about alternatve existences-- what it would be like if I lived here, for example, or if I'd never left those places and just decided to make a life there. I could so easily picture myself in Istanbul, where I lived for six months in 1995, yet I've never since been back. Or I wonder what might have happened if I'd randomly picked Japan in which to study abroad as a college junior rather than Morocco. These decisions are sometimes so arbitrary, yet weighty at the same time.

Kyoto observations

Gion is the famous geisha district of Kyoto, with lots of old wooden buildings occupied by restaurants, tea houses, and bars. I didn't see any geishas, but apparently they don't come out until it's dark. There are very few of them left these days anyway. It was cold and cloudy when we walked around Gion with our volunteer guide from the Good Samaritans club. Tourists and busy streets gave way to this quiet riverside scene, right in the middle of it all.

My memories of Kyoto will be a blur of temples and tourist sites, of walking back and forth between our hotel and the super modern (and controversial) train station, the Matsubaya inn, where we slept on futons on tatami mats on the floor for four nights. Kyoto was more relaxed than Tokyo, but also more touristy.

It's getting close to New Year's here. Up until Christmas, we heard Christmas music in literally every store we entered, and lighted tree displays were everywhere. That ended after December 25th, which was not a holiday here, but now people are gearing up for New Year's, and many of them are off of work now. In Kyoto we wandered through two contrasting markets - the Nishiki market, with hundreds of food stalls selling an array of pickles, fish, and fermented bean pastes,
and the basement of the department store Daimaru, with its stylish displays of many of the same foods. (Department stores are a different experience here, particularly the food floor. You can buy a whole dinner's worth of delicious gourmet items, heat them up in the microwave provided, and enjoy some great cuisine on the spot.) However, since it's close to New Year's, even in the sleek department store, the hawking has begun in earnest, and from each section, sales clerks beckon you to buy, buy, buy. And here, randomly, yet another excellent French bakery.

Christmas in Kyoto

On Christmas morning, we got up, had breakfast in our hotel (they do a la carte eggs, toast, and coffee), and walked about an hour to the Kiyomazu temple. We had planned to wander in the general direction of eastern Kyoto, which is set in the hills and still has a lot of traditional wooden architecture, but we actually made it to a destination we had planned to see later with a volunteer guide. We first ended up at a cemetery, where there were only locals, and we talked a while to this guy who sells incense, which the locals take to the tombs of their loved ones. They rent incense boxes, which are kept for them in a niche in the wall. They clean up the tombs as well, and there's even a cleaning service that will do it for you - note the way even tombs look cute and happy when they're clean.


Kiyomazu, meaning "clear water," dates back to 798, though the current Buddhist temple was built (with no nails whatsoever) in 1633. It is up a very steep hill, and there were a lot of Asian tourists there. They were all buying charms and amulets that they can leave at the temple for good luck for various life endeavors.

The temples specialize in Buddhist vegetarian cuisine, so we stopped at a restaurant to try some. I had an excellent noodle bowl with udon wheat noodles and tofu. Nour had soba noodles with herring on top. Here's how you know what to order - you pick it out from a display of plastic food, though even with visuals it's sometimes hard to tell what you're getting.
We bought a few small souvenirs and then found a bus to take us back to central Kyoto.

That afternoon, we had been invited to Christmas dinner with Bill and Setsuko, longtime Kyoto residents and friends of Susie Robertshaw and Charlie Rock (Rollins), who they knew from grad school (in second picture here).

We met at the train station and took a train thirty minutes away to a little village called Ohmi-hachiman. "Little village" is a relative term - 70,000 people live here -- but it had a very quiet, countryside feel to it. We dined at the house of Bill and Setsuko's pastor, Scott, and his wife Hiroko, who made us feel welcome even though we'd never met them before. They are loosely associated with the Episcopal church but liberal and open to coexisting with other faiths. What I didn't know is that there have been Christians in Japan since the Portugese converted some people in the 16th century, and there are about a million native Christians now. Other expats and Japanese were also in attendance, and we loved being in Scott's hand-built house (he's also a carpenter) with a warm fire and great food. Later we did a gift exchange, which we had fortunately known about ahead of time, and came away with some very nice Japanese presents.

Behind their house is a day care for children and the elderly, which is run by Hirok's family. We got to tour the daycare and it was fascinating. The whole building was set in a forest of bamboo and cedar, and it had windows everywhere, hardwood floors and tatami mats (with a heated floor beneath), and there were different rooms for kids up to five. In one room some three year olds were playing house, with tiny little Japanese kitchen implements and other things you'd find in a Japanese home. Sofia got very excited in the room with the babies her age, and talked avidly about "Mae Mae and Brit Brit," her teachers at her daycare in Florida. We had to take a picture.

It was also interesting to talk to people about their perspectives on life in Japan. Most of the guests were affiliated with Kyoto universities in some capacity or other, so we compared notes on the educational systems in both places, and the challenges of expatriate life. All in all, it was an excellent way to spend Christmas, being welcomed by people who took us in even though they'd never met us before.

A traditional Japanese onsen town - Ito

In Kyoto now after a one-night detour to Ito, an onsen town that just had a little earthquake last week. Onsens are the traditional Japanese hot springs, and because of all the volcanoes they are everywhere. I wanted to have the full "ryokan" experience of staying in a traditional hotel, where you sleep on futons atop tatami mats and an attendant makes your bed ready for you at night, serves you tea, etc. I also wanted to go to a town more likely to be frequented by Japanese tourists than foreigners, which made it a little hard to pick a hotel, but spending a lot of time on the TripAdvisor Japan forums and posting questions led me to pick out Ito and our hotel, which was called Yokikan.

Ito is a little town about an hour and a half away from Tokyo. The train ride there was beautiful - Tokyo seemed to stretch on forever, followed by Yokohama, another big city right next to it, and then we saw Mt. Fuji on our right and on our left was the ocean, which was a very deep shade of blue. We had the ocean on our left the entire train trip. At the train station, a taxi took us the five minute drive to the "ryokan" - the traditional Japanese hotel. The town itself was reminiscent of a little French mountain town, Nour commented, except that the buildings all have those sort of hatched, Chinese-style gable roofs. The ryokan was up the side of a hill and it was very peaceful and extremely quiet-- surrounded by outcroppings of rocks and lots of foliage. So the town was both mountainous and a beach town at the same time. We waited for our room to be ready while Sofia slept - it was naptime - and then they took us up to a big room with a tatami mat floor, a low table and low chairs with cushions. They got a futon out for Sofia to sleep on, and she continued with her nap so we decided to try the baths. There were hardly any other guests in the ryokan; because of the earthquake last week (which our guide in Tokyo had told us about), many people had canceled. This was good because we had the baths to ourselves, and although I was planning to try the baths regardless of the presence of other people, the fact that you wear no clothes while bathing with others seemed just the slightest bit awkward.

The hotel had two baths in the lobby and one bath that was open-air on the roof top. The two baths in the lobby were same sex-- one was smaller than the other, so they open the bigger one to men after 8:30 pm at night and to women the rest of the time, so we took turns having a bath while the other watched Sofia - you shower & soap up first before rinsing off and then getting in the water. The water is extremely hot, and only about two feet deep - you just sit there until you can't take it anymore and then leave. Our room had kimonos for us to wear (called yukata), plus a slightly heavier robe and slippers, and at an onsen, you're supposed to just walk around the hotel the entire time in your kimonos.

Once Sofia woke up, we went to explore the center of town, which was about a ten minute walk away. There was a walking district with no cars allowed, but it got dark early and there really were not many people around at all. We got sidetracked in a department store that had a wealth of "bento boxes"- those little lunch boxes I've been obsessed with. I loaded up on those, as well as on gifts, while Sofia played in yet another store playground.
Then we looked for a place to eat dinner. We finally ended up getting teriyaki chicken burgers at a fast food place. We walked home in the dark - it gets dark very early here - and then we all went to use the "mixed bath" on the roof - the open air bath set into rocks on the side of a hill with a waterfall and tropical foliage. We had Sofia in there for no more than 5 minutes, since it was so hot, but she loved it, and it was salt water but only had a shower outside, so I took her down to the other bath to wash her off in the shower and let her splash in the other one for a few minutes. She went right to sleep that night and we actually got to see a fireworks display from our window, as it was the Emperor's Birthday here. Oh, and there was a vending machine with $3 Asahi beers, so we enjoyed those, too.


This morning we had the breakfast included, which was a traditional one, like no other I've ever had. Our attendant took away the futons and set up the breakfast, which consisted of lots of little platters involving various fishlike dishes. Tofu in little cast iron pots. Miso soup, which I like. A cold, soft boiled egg in a cold bowl of what tasted like soy sauce soup. Various pickles. A few pieces of raw fish, sushi style, which were fine. Grilled fish, which was also pretty tasty and salty. Hot rice. Green tea, no sugar. Various condiments that we had no idea what to do with. All in all, it was obviously haute cuisine, Japanese style, though probably the full pleasure of it was lost on us - I think breakfast is the hardest meal to forego your own culture's food for.

The owner of the hotel (who got an MBA from UC Berkeley and was extremely nice) drove us to the train station just in time for our local train to the city of Atami, 30 minutes away. We had a tight connection there with the "shinkansen" - the bullet train that would take us to Kyoto in only 2 hours (probably a 4 hour drive by car). Basically we had 5 minutes between when the local train arrived to find the bullet train platform and get on. But the local train was delayed at one of the stops by another train coming through the mountain, so we literally arrived at 10:41 and had to get to the platform by 10:43 for the bullet train. Turns out bullet trains were completely in a different place, so we ran - me with Sofia in my arms and Noureddine with his blue suitcase, two backpacks, and a stroller. (Did I mention they have this amazing service where youc an send your large luggage on to your next hotel? Costs $15 and we sent our giant green suitcase to Kyoto, where it was waiting for us today). We just made it - people were boarding when we got onto the platform - and we had to walk back 6 cars to our reserved seats.


The bullet train was exciting! nobody talks, just like on the subways. We passed Mt. Fuji up close - it is huge and covered with snow and almost looks like a moon formation or something, it is so impressive. We passed lots of little towns, urbanized places, industrial cities. We finally got a cup of very good coffee (I was already getting a headache) from the girl who goes down the aisle with a food cart. Lots of people on the train are eating little packaged bento boxes, like this girl, full of sushi and rice and pickles and other delights.


Once in Kyoto, we marveled at the postmodern beauty of the train station, which is this massive glass and steel structure with an 11 story shopping mall full of expensive stores. We walked the ten minutes to our hotel - Kyoto already feels much more relaxed than Tokyo, and it was pretty quiet after we left the hustle and bustle of the train station.

Our hotel here is the Matsubaya Ryokan - it is in the style of the traditional hotels, with futons on the floor, but the big difference is that there are no meals included and nobody to put your bedding down at night, so you do it yourself. It is clean, the room is big enough, with a tiny, tiny bathroom.

We spent the afternoon exploring the Kyoto station's gigantic 11 story department store, letting Sofia play for awhile in the children's play area on the children's floor. She mastered this plastic slide they had and was so proud of herself and so cute as she came down the slide over and over again, laughing. Again, shocking prices - $15 for a small Snoopy? - but we just looked.

There was a sign for Cafe Du Monde - same font as the place in New Orleans - and it said it had beignets. But it didn't, just Japanese food. I asked about the beignets and they pointed at the Mr. Donut next door but said they had no beignets. We went to one of the excellent bakeries in the train station and got several different pastries to bring back to the hotel to eat later, etc. And then we came back to the hotel and did laundry, which was a huge relief. We all have clean clothes now. And are set for a few days in Kyoto.

Random Tokyo Images

People line up for everything - here, waiting for the train...

This karate school photo, shot from the train, reminded me of the movie Shall We Dance, about the lonely Tokyo businessman who takes ballroom dancing classes. Not sure why, need to see it again when we return.

Many people wear masks here to avoid getting sick. Sofia was particularly freaked out by this one woman, who tried to talk to her.

Pachinko parlors, noisy, light-filled places where older men play something that resembles pinball.

Many advertisements for grooming products are geared toward men... moreso than in the States.

Shibuya

For our last day in Tokyo we finally got to Shibuya, which has a Times Square-like atmosphere, neon televisions on all the buildings, and multiple crosswalks where hordes of people cross all at once - it's either cars going or people going, but the effect is impressive. There are also people shouting on megaphones - I have no idea what - it sounds like old movies set in Communist countries where someone is spouting propaganda in an unintelligible language, but I saw one guy with a sign that said "Good News" so I assume he was preaching. Shibuya is also very popular with young people, and we saw the coolest, most cutting-edge fashions there yet. I believe this crosswalk was featured in Lost in Translation, and at rush hour just the sheer number of people streaming by is mind blowing.

There's a dog statue at the subway station with a touching story - back in the 1920s, the dog waited for his owner, a professor at a local university, every day. When the professor died, the dog continued to wait faithfully at the subway each day until he himself died several years later.

We went to the basement 'food hall' of a department store called Seibu and made a sort of picnic dinner of their sushi, chicken cutlets, potato croquettes, yakitori, etc, which was fun. Walked around admiring the architecture (many of the buildings are narrow yet tall, which David explained was because originally, people parceled out land into very narrow areas, but that then it was difficult to get land out of the family, so if developers wanted to build something big and wide, they'd have a harder time acquiring and tearing down neighboring properties to do so), watching the people cross again and again, and checking out a capsule hotel, where guests (usually male) can rent a tiny space atop other tiny spaces, pull a curtain shut, and spend the night. We went to another department store, Tokyu Hands, in search of a playground for Sofia, but it did not materialize. However, she played contendedly for awhile in the kids' section, with other Japanese children, and more people oohed and ahhed over her cuteness and asked to take her picture.


I thought I might pick up some Hello Kitty souvenirs for her but they were outrageously expensive - try $50 for a Hello Kitty picture frame, for example, no bigger than four inches in height, or $60 for a little plastic piano where people pop up when you hit a key. I did manage to find a deal on a pair of these special, supportive Tsukihoshi sneakers for my friend Ryan's little boy, though they didn't have much in the same brand for little girls.

And that brings us up to speed on our last night in Tokyo. My overall impressions are that Tokyo is amazing, clean, beautiful, packed with people, and exhausting. It is fairly straightforward to get around on the subway but it can be confusing at first. At rush hour it's unbelievable how many people pack into subway cars, and though we avoided rush hour as much as possible, sometimes it was unavoidable, and then I noticed there were absolutely no children except Sofia. The trains and subway cars are also impressively silent, with no talking. Cell phones are forbidden. Everyone is texting, reading, or sleeping. How nice it would be if Americans turned off their cell phones in public spaces and just shut up for once, and you didn't have to listen to people's mundane or self-important chit chat. People move fast here and don't seem to take up as much space. There are no fat people. No one is screaming at anyone, no one is visibly angry about anything. But the pace is just relentless - you feel like you can't really linger anywhere without getting run over. Everything is stylish, slick, futuristic, and expensive. Tomorrow we go to Ito, a hot spring (onsen) resort town, where Japanese people go to relax. So it should be a polar opposite of the Tokyo experience, but we'll see. Certainly we feel like we need some rest after all this ourselves.

Day 3 - Tsukiji Fish Market, then Talk at Sophia University

We were all set for a dawn visit to the Tsukiji Fish Market, which does over a million yen in trade of fish each day. The auctions begin early, and I had high hopes of getting there in time to see hundreds of thousands of fish, lined up and ready to be sold. But at 5 am, all dressed to go, Sofia had a little meltdown, so we let her go back to sleep and waited until 8 or so to leave. We were set for a sushi breakfast. A few train and subway stops later, we arrived at the fish market. Most of the action had ended but there were fork lifts zipping around and lines at various sushi joints. We picked the one with the longest line and waited an hour to get to another tiny counter where we let the sushi chefs serve us the catches of the day in the form of nigiri - raw fish slabs on a tiny bed of rice. Everything was quite tasty and worth the wait, particularly the fattiest cuts of tuna, which are prized. Others we sampled included yellowtail, eel, and sea urchin, but I mostly did not know what we were eating. I also liked the way they spread a layer of horseradish between the rice and fish. Sofia liked the miso soup and the green tea but isn't a big fan yet of sushi.

That afternoon, I was particularly excited to meet up with anthropologist David Slater at Sophia University, where I was to give a talk to a group of about 50 Japanese students who attend this Jesuit, English-language university. On Monday afternoon we headed over to Shinjuku, then took the Chuo line to Yatsuya, where we met him in a Godiva store in a shopping center above the metro. He walked us to his office and got Sofia set up with some coloring books while we prepared for my talk.

I addressed the students about women, identity, and public space in Morocco, and for the most part they seemed interested. They talked to me a bit about similar issues they face in Japan - harassment (groping on trains is apparently a big problem), respect, careers, and societal expectations for marriage. It was really great to see what a typical class at this university looked like, and many of the students, though born in Japan, are native English speakers and have some sort of hybrid Japanese identity (one parent of a different nationality, for example). One student talked after class about an ethnography she's doing with a bar hostess, and I learned the interesting fact that bar hostess is a position to which a large majority of elementary school-aged girls aspire to, according to polls taken in Tokyo. The bar hostesses are also unioninzing, in an era in which Japanese unions are generally dying out and losing much of their power.

I learned more intriguing facts about Japanese culture, as well as what it's like to be a foreigner working and living in Japan, over dinner. David took us to Roppongi Hills, which was beautiful - a newly created arts district with a funky little neighborhood leading up to it. Beautiful architecture, and the best groomed dogs I have ever seen in my life. We had an amazing dinner at a Chinese restaurant - Peking duck and multiple tasty side dishes, including a sweet eggplant dish that reminded me of something I had in China. It all reminded me of food I tried in China, and there's very little resemblance to the strip mall Chinese food we end up getting at home in the US. David has lived in Japan off and on for twenty years, and has been at his current job for fourteen, so he knows the language and culture quite well. He was so hospitable, and so interesting to talk to, and I was only sorry that Sofia had yet another jetlag meltdown and we had to cut the night short. He put us in a taxi back to our hotel and she was asleep even before the taxi pulled away.

Day 2 - the elusive pork-free ramen bowl...

Despite having sampled some tasty Tokyo food so far, Sofia wasn't eating much, and we were also feeling a bit peckish. We looked for some place with a breakfast buffet and ended up at Denny's. But this was no American Denny's - it was sleeker and cleaner, more like a Panera's in decor. We got Sofia pancakes (served in the shape of a Mickey Mouse with cocoa puffs for eyes and a giant blot of ice cream for a nose), had French toast (with regular sugar instead of powdered), lots of coffee, and eggs to get us started. It was Sunday, so our mission was to head to Harajuku, the neighborhood in central Tokyo where teenagers in outrageous fashions parade about, setting trends later adopted by rock stars like Gwen Stefani. The whole business is termed "cosplay," as in "costume play."

We took the Yamanote train loop to Harajuku, which was, like everything else we'd seen so far, absolutely packed with people. Because of the crowds we opted to carry Sofia that day in a sling, which was fine for awhile but gradually got exhausting. We saw a few teenagers dressed in punk gear near the station and then walked through the heavily forested paths of Yoyogi park, where we ended up at the Meiji shrine, a monument to former rulers of Japan, but saw no more crazily dressed teenagers. Coming out of the park we found a square where Japanese men who long to have been born in 1950s America dance to rockabilly music and drink beer. Eventually we asked enough people and were directed toward harajuku street, which Nour pointed out was much like being in a Moroccan medina on a crowded market day. So unbelievably crowded, with lots of neon boutiques and noodle shops and bars, but all sort of cute and sanitized.

We walked for awhile then had had enough, so we headed out on our second quest, to find a place I'd read about on a website dedicated to ramen noodles in Tokyo. This place supposedly served one of the best bowls of chicken ramen, which is not the standard way of serving ramen, which is frequently made with pork. It was in a neighborhood called Oimachi, and once we got off the subway we wandered around in the cold trying to find the place based on the way various landmarks had looked on Google Earth from our hotel room. Once we found it, we had to wait until it opened at 6, so there was more wandering about in the cold until this hour came.

At the ramen shops, you choose your bowl from a vending machine, pay the machine, then hand your ticket to the chef and sit up at a little bar waiting for the food. This is standard for Japanese fast food (see picture, below, from a different place - the irony here is the title - "homemade curry"). The ramen bowl was OK but a little gamey - very fatty chicken. A little disappointed, we headed back to the hotel. Tokyo is huge, so even little tasks like this take hours.

Day 1 - Meeting Mr. Hayashi, Asakusa, Akihabara

After the middle-of-the night jetlag wakeup, we slept until 8:30 or so and then woke up to find coffee and explore our new environment. We are a ten minute walk from the Shinagawa train station, and this being Japan, it's extremely clean despite being near a train station. It's also a business district without a lot going on, but that's good in a way because once you leave the station, things calm down, unlike the circus-like atmosphere of some of the tourist spots. On our first morning, we walked around the train station looking for breakfast options. We couldn't find anything appropriate so we walked back toward our hotel where there was a Japanese diner-style restaurant called Royal Host. Nour had salmon, rice, and miso soup, I had baked eggs with spinach and toast, the coffee kept coming, and Sofia ate some of his salmon but was basically not interested in anything else. The portions were not overly large, which was to become a common theme of our time here.

In the lobby of a hotel next door, we quickly checked Internet and a Japanese woman in her twenties decked out in lots of bright colors asked to take a photo on her phone of Sofia. This has also become a common theme - exclamations of "kawai!" and Sofia smiling and pretending to be bashful.

Somehow it was time for Sofia's nap already so we returned to the hotel and she slept for awhile. At 2 pm we had a meeting in our hotel lobby with a Tokyo Volunteer Guide named Ichiro Hayashi. There are volunteer guide organizations all over Japan, and it is an amazing service. You're expected to pay transportation costs and meal costs for your guide, but that's about it. Ichiro was a retired machinist who worked for many years at Toshiba, and in his retirement he helps his wife take care of their two grandchildren (3 and 9 months) and occasionally goes out on spear fishing outings. I had decided I wanted him to take us to Asakusa and Akihabara, a Buddhist temple and electronics district, respectively.

He was terrific - immediately we fed our subway passes in the wrong part of the machine, got them all tangled up, and he helped us straighten that out with the conductor. We rode the subway for quite a long time to the northern part of Tokyo and got out into a packed, chaotic atmosphere surrounding this temple. A long road leading to the temple is lined with vendors selling trinkets and food, and from time to time we'd stop to try different foods, Ichiro explaining carefully to us what we were seeing-- how the fish market union had sponsored a particular sign leading into the temple, what a particular symbol or trinket meant in Japanese cosmology, etc. We had some unrefined sake, which reminded me of apple cider, hot, sweet and not particularly alcoholic. We had some kind of chewy rice sweet that was hot, coated in something like ground up sesame, and reminded me of taffy. And we tried these little crackers that tasted like peanut brittle, Ichiro buying several bags that he gave to us later.

Sofia had a cold, so she was a little unhappy with the cold weather and her nose was running a lot. She cried to return to the ablution fountain, so Nour took her there while Ichiro and I went into the inner part of the temple. It reminded me of a lot of Buddhist temples in China, outside a screened-in inner sanctum, tourists were throwing coins into something, and in the inner sanctum people sat praying quietly to the goddess Kannon. The whole temple was dedicated to her over a thousand years ago by fishermen who found a gold image of her in their nets; however, we were looking at a post World War II replica, since the Americans apparently bombed the original. Another theme that kept coming up in our Tokyo visit - how new everything was, since the original version had been bombed in World War II.

Behind the temple was a show with a trained monkey who did back flips and bowed, which fascinated Sofia, and then we tried a few more foods (some sort of gooey balls involving octopus, and french fries made out of potato starch dough, which were surprisingly good). Then we left on the subway for Akihabara, the electronics district.

This was mostly just a big boulevard of brightly lit stores selling electronics, with girls outside wearing short skirts, handing out flyers, and inviting people to various places, including the "maid cafes" which are also a big thing in Tokyo. At a maid cafe you can drink your tea while a girl dressed in a French maid costume (not necessarily revealing) calls you "master." We didn't actually make it inside one of those but did go to a shopping emporium staffed entirely by women in maid costumes.

Ichiro had done research and found a place for us to eat dinner that was in a modern shopping plaza decked out in tasteful Christmas lights (Christmas decor, music, and lights are absolutely everywhere) filled with trendy little restaurants - it served some kind of seafood omelet that they cook on the hibachi grill in the middle of your table, as well as a soy-based rice and noodle dish with some other type of seafood, both specialities of Osaka that have become popular in recent years in Tokyo. I'm amazed that in Tokyo, almost every neighborhood is not only clean but also filled with expensive eateries that are consistently packed. The cheapest you can seem to get is a bowl of noodles for about $4-$5.


I'm also impressed by how stylish Tokyo residents are. I read on some website that Japanese people don't wear black because it's a funeral color - wrong! Everyone is wearing black. The businessmen are all in dark, slim-cut suits, and the women are extremely stylish - dark tights, high heels, sleek skirts, black coats with fur colors, perfectly done nails, colorful cell phones with little hanging charms, designer handbags, and well-coiffed hair. Bangs are in in a big way. There are also plenty of cool, non-business attire-wearing teenagers and people in their twenties, guys in deliberately ripped jeans and pointy-toed boots (the girls wear the suede boots with little hanging pompons). Most of the men have razor cuts and seem to use a lot of hair products, regardless of their attire.

Ichiro was very friendly and told us a lot about his life; it was so amazing to be able to have someone take us around without any confusion, because Tokyo is a confusing place. We had a great time with him and gave him a Rollins sweatshirt when we parted in the train station a little after 7:30 that night.