Tokyo
February 12th, 2006
I’ve been back from Japan almost a week now, and along with the jet lag, my post-Tokyo blues are slowly dissipating. It was an amazing place, a city I could definitely live in and I felt genuinely sad to leave.
As a city Tokyo is super-dense. High-rise and three dimensional in a way that London just isn’t. Restaurants stacked on top of each other up to the 9th floor; high-rise, narrow shops packed-in tightly everywhere; even competing clothes stores piled on top of one-other. Somehow though, it didn’t seem overly crowded to me. Maybe because we were wandering around in the daytime on a weekday, with all the salarymen safely off the streets. Or maybe commuting has inured me to high-density humanity. Although having said that, here’s a video of Shibuya crossing I took (broadband required), the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. It got pretty intense right in the middle of a cross, especially during the rush hour (it’s relatively quiet in this clip). Oh, and enjoy our banal Starbucks related conversation.
Getting around and making ourselves understood had been something of a worry for me beforehand, but we didn’t have any problems at all. Metro signs are meticulously duplicated in English, and even when people didn’t speak English they were enthusiastic and friendly about trying to understand us. If we got in real trouble (i.e. we were starting to feel really hungry) then the phrasebook came out, and things usually went okay (the phrase “please order for us” was employed on more than one occasion).
We ate Japanese every night, and aside from a single tofu-based “please order for us” incident, everything was really good. I’m more a fan of teriyaki and udon meals than sushi, but the sushi I had was delicious. Eating out is more like tapas, with food not delivered simultaneously, and often not particularly delivered to the person who ordered it - the assumption being that everyone shares. I’m fine with this; it’s my preferred mode of eating anyway.
Our main reason for visiting was shopping, and the shopping was terrific. I suppose with a population of 12m you can support just about any subculture or niche, but even so, there were a very large number of shops selling exactly the kind of cool, urban style that we’re into. Factor in electronics retail on an previously unimaginable scale, and a rich and widely accepted toy culture, and you can start to understand why it was that I was in geek heaven. Call me otaku. I spent a lot.
On the downside …well, I suppose the accommodation was expensive at £120 / night. But everything else really wasn’t; I really don’t think Tokyo deserves it’s reputation for being costly. Cabs were so cheap and numerous as to be almost disposable. Food was reasonable everywhere, although that could be down to us eating Japanese all the time and avoiding wine (obviously, given Lara’s current disposition). The travel time is a drag too. I was away for almost 8 days, but had only 5.5 in Tokyo. There’s no getting around that, though, it’s a bargain I’ll settle for.
Overall it was a terrific trip. A better, more interesting, and enjoyable place than New York in my opinion, and that’s saying a lot. The next time I’ll be saying konichiwa can’t come quickly enough. Photos on flickr below.