As beautiful as it was yesterday, today was absolutely the pits. Cloudy, misty, rainy, probably never got above 50. It turns out that the $7.99 I paid for a compact travel umbrella might have been one of the better investments I made before I came over here. The thing is, today was a good day. I saw some cool stuff, I had a fantastic dinner, and I got to meet my Japanese pen pal, Rieko. We decided that it would be a good idea to do something that would keep us mostly indoors and out of the rain. I suggested Odaiba. She had never been there, so that looked like the best plan.
First, a bit about Odaiba. It's an area of reclaimed land in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Until about 6 years ago, it was a wasteland - a muddy plain with not much on it. Now, it's one of the major entertainment centers in town. There are a few places that stand out for their size and prominence. At the top of the list is the giant Ferris Wheel. According to them, it's the biggest Ferris Wheel in the world. It's also absolutely plush, in Ferris Wheel terms. All the cars have heat, a sound system, and are fully enclosed. As you approach the top, a friendly female voice announces in Japanese and English that you're about to get to the highest point, 150 meters from the ground. For the metrically challenged, that's 492 feet. On a clear day, we would have easily seen Mount Fuji.
The other places that stand out are Decks Tokyo Beach, Palette Town, the Fuji TV building, and Toyota Mega Web. A bit about each... Decks Tokyo Beach is a shopping mall with a little something extra - an indoor amusement park. It's owned by Sega, the video game company. The highlight was the "Aqua Nova 3D Motion Adventure. This was a motion-simulator ride, the kind that shows you a 3-D movie while your seats move around. Incredibly immersive and well-coordinated. Along the same lines was "Wild Wings," which was the same type of thing with a regular movie. Lots of "flying" over things, into things, and through things. Pretty cool. The lowlight was an absolutely hateful indoor roller coaster called "Speed Boarder." It was a great concept - a very small 2-seat car that rides sideways. Occasionally the car turns 180 degrees so that you face in the opposite direction. But the flaw is the execution. Every change of direction was so sudden that it just about snapped your neck. No more than ten seconds into the ride, I was seriously concerned that I would hurt my back. I didn't, but I still think that whoever designed and built this ride should be taken out and shot. And that's all I have to say about that.
Next up was Palette Town, which is a colorful, glittering nightmare of arcade games, pachinko machines, and shops full of junky merchandise. We walked through quickly to get to the Ferris Wheel.
We also got a quick look at the Fuji TV building, which is pictured below. It's an absolutely unique building, like many of the more modern buildings in this city. But on a day like today, it looked like a particularly menacing sci-fi invention. Which is not an altogether bad thing, in my estimation. Once you've seen it, you'll certainly remember it. The big sphere toward the top of the building houses a planetarium, which was closed today. (For whatever reason, just about every museum and cultural institution is closed on Mondays.)
What I found most impressive was the Toyota Mega Web. (By the way... in Japan, it's pronounced "TOE-yo-ta.") First off, the place is huge. There must be three or four hundred cars on display. It's comprised of several buildings - a new-car showroom, a "history garage," (which goes back to the 1930s, when the company was called Toyoda, after its founder) and a display of race cars, concept cars, and other odds and ends. One of the things you can do (and we did), is take a ride in a prototype electric car. Since Rieko has never driven a car (you absolutely don't have to in Tokyo), I made sure she was in the driver's seat. That wasn't a problem, because the car drives itself. It's not on a track - there are some sort of signal emitters in the loop the car runs on, and a sensor in the car that follows the emitters. All you do is climb in and press the "Start" button.
After that, we caught the train out of Odaiba, which crosses the Rainbow Bridge (also pictured below) and goes to Shimbashi Station, the major transportation hub in southeastern Tokyo. When we got off the train in Shimbashi, we encountered the reality of 5:00 PM in Tokyo - the crush of commuters. Men in suits, women in nice dresses, coming home from the office. Shimbashi is one of the areas where people go out for dinner and drinks after work, and there are many places to accommodate them. Restaurants, bars, pachinko parlors, and convenience stores. And lights. There are places with more lights, and I'll see them, but this was a good primer.
Rieko took me to a restaurant she knows in the area. It's a thoroughly Japanese place, though not so thorough that you have to take off your shoes at the door. It was all light-colored varnished wood, low ceilings, and salarymen (the Japanese equivalent of "office drones") out with their bosses for dinner and drinks. The food was fantastic. We started out with buttered corn, asparagus smothered in cheese, and a small appetizer of tuna (cooked - not raw!) with some sort of green leafy vegetable. Then we had a "chicken bowl," which consists of ground chicken meatballs, soft tofu, and assorted vegetables in a chicken broth. All of this for about $23, in a city where you can't sneeze for less than $5, and where I've been eating a breakfast buffet at the hotel for $10.
Rieko and I parted ways after dinner, but only after she made sure I would be able to find my way back to the hotel. (Piece o' cake - take the Asakusa line from Shimibashi to Nihombashi Station, transfer to the Tozai line, ride one stop to Kayabacho Station and go to exit #3, which is literally around the corner from the hotel.) I think she was a little bit concerned after I'd told her about getting lost yesterday afternoon. The thing is, I didn't get lost on the subway - I got lost walking around on the streets. First thing on the agenda tomorrow is a trip to the Tourist Center near the Imperial Palace to grab some street maps. The subway is easy - the streets, not so much.
When we left the restaurant, it was dark and rainy, and the streets were crowded with people under umbrellas. Something flashed in my mind - "I'm suddenly an extra in "Blade Runner." To be fair, the scene had nothing like the undercurrent of despair and absolute anonymity in the movie. While "Blade Runner" had an atmosphere of urban desolation, Shimbashi at 7:30 on a rainy evening had utter vitality. People were walking with a spring in their step, not trudging. This was my first taste of Tokyo as a Big City. And it was great.
Rieko was a delight. She struggles with her English sometimes, but we have had no problem communicating. (It doesn't hurt that she keeps her Japanese/English talking translator/dictionary in her purse.) She has already been very helpful with suggestions about seeing places I didn't even know existed. And she's able to get on the net and look up things in Japanese that you can't find in English. A good resource and a great friend.
Only eight pictures today, to make up for the ridiculous amount yesterday. Crappy weather has a way of moderating one's photography instinct.
The plan for tomorrow - a quick stop out to the tourist center to grab maps and anything else that looks useful, then a trip to Yanaka, a neighborhood north and a little bit west of the Imperial Palace. From what I've read, it's a remnant of shitamachi (literally: "low city"), where the common people of Edo lived. While I have many specific places I want to see in Tokyo, this is one of those places where I just want to wander around and soak it up. (Here's an occasion when a street map will be invaluable.) I fully expect to talk with people I don't know, eat things I can't recognize, and see little houses and shops along narrow streets with no names. (That's not a U2 reference - many of these streets have no names!)
In the evening, after Rieko gets home from work, we're going to Ginza-dori to find the Ando Cloisonne and Watanabe Woodblock Print shops. The sound you'll hear at roughly 5:00 tomorrow morning will be my credit card melting. After the Ginza, we may pass by Tokyo Tower on our way to Shinjuku, an area of restaurants, bars, night clubs, the blazing advertising signs you've seen in pictures, and the busiest subway station in the world. In the immortal words of Jack Kerouac, as Allan Ginsberg commenced to debut his epic poem "Howl":
"Lift up your skirts, ladies, we're about to take a walk through Hell."
And I mean that in a good way.
Enjoy the pictures!
