Tokyo

Hey Everybody! (Adam): Thu 30/11/2006 9:36 AM

Hey everyone, (.....continued from Beijing page....)

Ok so the next day we flew to Tokyo and were greeted by some extremely amused customs agents. I was handed a sheet with pictures of guns, explosives, toxic substances, knives and drugs on it and asked if i was carrying such items. The smile on the guy's face told me that both of us knew it was a stupid question - even if i was carrying anything like that i would hardly admit it to a customs agent and he clearly couldn't be bothered to search my bag. So he asks me what my reason for coming to Japan is and when i say tourism he looks at my two big bags and laughs coz i probably have enough stuff to be staying forever. He waves me on with a cheerful "Welcome to Japan sir."

Carly's friend Chris was already at the hostel in Tokyo so it was nice to see him and catch up on what we've all been doing. Next day we went to the Sony Building coz they have a huge showroom there where u can try out the latest gadgets, some of which haven't been released yet. We spent the afternoon in Ginza and Harajuku checking out the shops where Tokyo's trendy kids hang out. Apparently the latest fashion there is to wear retro American clothes from the 70's and 80's meaning the shops are packed with unlikely items like giant sunglasses, furry tank tops and skintight white jeans! Although this sounds like fashion hell somehow the Japanese teenagers we saw in the shops somehow made these awful clothes add up to more than the sum of their parts. Sadly, if u see the photos i'm sending home with this, i just couldn't seem to pull it off (i really thought those snakeskin trousers would work). Still u'll see from the pics that we all bought a pair of shades and i believe Japan is the only place in the world where u can make friends wearing sunglasses like those.

We visited Tokyo's finest Buddhist Temple, Sensoji, but it was much the same as the ones we have already seen in China. Anyway it's not the Temples that make an impression in Tokyo. This city is by far the most advanced we have been to. Everything is state of the art - the toilet seats are all heated and have a control panel to control the built-in bidet; taxi doors open and close by themselves; u can put all ur change into a train ticket machine at once and it counts it; u can buy a robot! Tokyo is great, and i didn't even mention the rotating car parks yet,,,

All this technology comes at a price though... I get the feeling that everyone in Tokyo is overworked. People get on the tube and fall asleep instantly, not even necessarily sitting down (i actually saw a guy sleeping in the queue for the toilets in the Tokyo Met building). What makes it obvious they do this everyday is the fact they wake up the instant the train gets to their stop in time to get off. So they go home straight to bed right? Wrong, they go to a pachinko parlour to get some relief from their high pressure jobs. Sounds seedy huh? In a way it is. They have these big arcades full of slot machines but instead of putting in money they hire ball bearings from the guy behind the counter and put them in the machine. The better they do at the game the more ball bearings they get back. I'm not sure exactly how the game works but we saw guys with 4 or 5 trays of balls so they must have been there a while. The same thing happens at the games arcades, kids don't go in there to play computer games, middle aged men in suits go there to gamble with tokens which are not exchangeable for money or prizes! Sounds crazy but they are addicted to the games themselves rather than the risk of gambling. If they are not playing Pachinko then they're hitting baseballs spat out by machines inside these big nets or playing odd computer games. We saw one where u have to groom ur own racehorse and show it love by stroking it on the touch-sensitive screen so u can race it against the other guys in there on a big screen at the front.

I'm making the Japanese sound a little weird here but they are actually fantastic people (i won't mention the manga cartoon porn). Several times people saw us looking at the map and pointed us in the right direction, one guy even walked us to the hostel the first night we arrived! And they give great service too... took us a while to realise this tho. When u go into a restaurant someone comes and takes ur order and then brings ur food and a jug of water for the table but if u later wanna order a few more drinks u can't seem to get their attention. This is because u didn't notice the electronic doorbell on the table - press this and a waiter appears instantly and does whatever u ask of them. It is a little impersonal and some of the restaurants even have a touch-screen computer by the door so u can order without even speaking to anyone! The waiters also have little hand-held gadgets that they put ur order into so it goes straight to the kitchen and they don't have to speak to the chef.

The buildings are huge in Tokyo and some of them are really impressive. We saw the Asahi Beer tower which is shaped like a giant pint and we went up to the viewing gallery on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Met Building. The view from up there was amazing and there were still quite a few buildings higher than us. From up there we could see a few helicopter pads on neighbouring buildings and the colourful lights across the city. It was pretty surreal but not as weird as walking along some of Tokyo's commercial streets. They are pretty enthusiastic about neon there so there are several areas best seen at night. If u go to them it's difficult to tell that it's night time at all. There are so many neon lights in Shinjuku and Shibuya that it is actually lighter at night than during the day!

Another popular leisure pursuit for the Japanese is karaoke. This is actually huge in all the Asian countries we have been to so far but Carly and I managed to resist the temptation until Chris joined us. Luckily we did coz in Tokyo the karaoke is high-tech. We hired a room to ourselves (thankfully they are all soundproof so we couldn't hear anyone else and more importantly they couldn't hear us) and when we ashamedly got a waiter to show us how to work the machine we set about destroying some classics. They had a huge catalogue of songs from all over the world and u just key in the number of the song and the words come up on the screen. Best thing is that when u start singing the lights dim automatically and a funky space-age cartoon picture is projected onto the walls! Ok so maybe I'm easily impressed but u just don't get this attention to detail anywhere else. Anyway karaoke was a lot of fun but i discovered a newfound respect for 50 Cent - getting words out that quick is not so easy.

Unfortunately Sumo wrestling only goes on for three months each year and we missed it so if u go to Japan make sure ur there during the season coz it sounds like a cool thing to see. We went to the Sumo Museum to find out a bit about it and apparently it's a really serious thing out there. There are several ranks of wrestlers and they move up every time they achieve a certain number of wins against men of their current rank. If they lose too many matches they get moved down unless they get to the top rank in which case they have to retire when they begin losing too much. These guys look really out of shape but under all the flab they have a lot of muscle. Obviously they have to be really strong to lift each other but they also wanna be heavy so the other guy can't move them. Unlike western boxing their are no weight division so a wrestler could end up fighting someone twice his size if they are in the same rank. Fights take place inside a ring of rope
and are won if any part of an opponent's body crosses the rope or touches the ground. Wrestlers have different haircuts to signify their rank but the topknot style they all have actually protects their heads from those hard falls as well. We watched a bit of wrestling on tv and it is actually pretty entertaining to see. Finally, did u know that Judo is actually derived from Sumo wrestling? now you do.

A few more little things should wrap it up for Japan. I know this has been long but bear with me a little longer please. We saw the famous six-way Shibuya crossing which i had never actually heard of until i saw Tokyo Drift (the third Fast and the Furious movie) on the plane, it was awful so don't bother watching it. The crossing was cool tho, they have diagonal crossings for pedestrians at some busy junctions in Tokyo so u don't have to cross twice. We went for a night out in Roppongi where all the ex-pats and tourists hang out. We thought about goin to Gas Panic Bar but decided against it because our guide book said there is only a small chance of "Getting decked by crazy militant types" in there, a small chance is still too much chance for me. I suppose it's all in the name - what kind of loon would hang out in a place called Gas Panic Bar, i guess it must be for the people who are not quite crazy enough to eat in Gas Panic Restaurant. I s'pose in the land of sushi they're just being honest. Seriously tho there are plenty of alternatives to sushi available in Japan, most of which are edible. They do have that age-old Asian tradition of the street vendor selling "unidentifiable meat-on-a-stick" tho so we avoided those. Mind u i normally don't eat anything if i don't know what it is but that rule had to be thrown out the window in Japan coz 5 days is just too long to not eat. Anyway got a little side-tracked there, our night out was a great success. We sat in a bar called Train Bar which aptly enough is a converted train carriage in the street. We then went into the unnamed bar next door for a bit and watched some crazy Japanese people letting their hair down before making some new friends thanks to our over-sized sunglasses.

Next day we flew to Hong Kong but that's another place and another email coz it's half one in the morning here and we lost a lot of sleep past few days going through a time warp... that one should keep u reading these hehe.

I'll quickly send some photos before i get to bed. Once again i hope ur all well and life is good.

Speak soon

Adam

Another continent (Carly): Thu 30/11/2006 9:45 AM

Hi everybody. (continued from Beijing page......) Tokyo

Our next destination was Japan where we met up with Chris (hiding under balaclava) - a friend of mine from school. The hostel I had found for us was great, Adam and I even had a TV, video and DVD player in our room! We didn't need it though as there was tons to do and having an extra person meant there was a lot more to talk about! Tokyo was a crazy city. The Japanese like to automate as much as possible - taxi doors open and close on their own, restaurants have vending machines in the entrance where you can order and pay for your food and the loo seats are heated! We found the people pretty crazy too! Everyone sleeps on the metro and each station has its own little jingle so that the commuters just learn to use it as an alarm! Though odd the people were very friendly - when we arrived and could not find the hostel (the instructions tell you to leave the metro station by an exit you cannot get to when coming from the airport) a kind man looked at the map I had copied off the website and walked us to the right road. We could not believe it, it was quite a long walk and he had been going in the opposite direction! A few times people asked us if they could help when we were looking at a map or metro map as well. We think the Japanese are right up there with the Germans for being friendly and helpful - it shocks us every time - too used to London I guess!

The city has a drinks vending machine for every 20 people in it but people never eat on the go - we got strange looks sitting eating sandwiches. The huge arcades full of pachinko machines were pretty odd too. We didn't really work the game out but it seems to require / result in thousands of ball bearings. We saw guys with 3 or 4 baskets full of them! There are "love hotels" in Japan where you can rent a room per hour - apparently frequented by married couples living with their parents. There are also 24hour places where you can rent a room to read comics, watch films and use the internet all night if you so desire.

There was less to do during the day than in Beijing but at night Tokyo was amazing! Everything has a neon sign and there is so much light from these that it is barely darker than during the day! Tokyo is a good place to buy electricals and we spent hours in the Sony Shop. It was great as there are lots of showrooms where you can try out the games machines, camera and video cameras. We also went into a demo area for the noise reducing headphones, it was decorated as a forest and had city noise blaring out of speakers. It was a bizarre experience especially as the headphones didn't seem to work for me. I found a phone that I can plug into computers and use with Skype so now time difference is my only problem when trying to call home! We shopped around for it but the Sony Shop selling products before they are generally released and we could not find one anywhere. When we went back for it 3 days later all the displays had been changed including the carpets on the first few levels.

Strangely enough we did not find Tokyo as expensive as we had expected. In the restaurants jugs of water are provided on every table you are not expected to order a drink. Even if we'd wanted to the waitresses tended to leave as soon as we'd all chosen a meal! The metro was quite cheap too although it was very complicated. There were a few different companies running lines and if you swapped company you had to buy another ticket. The tickets were confusing too as you needed to know how much your journey was going to cost by referring to one of the maps in the station (which were only in Japanese) and there were different maps for each company! But we managed to get everywhere we wanted to go even if it was not always by the cheapest or quickest route!

The highlight of Tokyo has to be the fashion! We spent hours in second hand clothes shops which seem to specialise in US 80's fashion. We found a lovely outfit for Adam - blue snakeskin trousers and a purple fur coat! The weirdest thing was that lots of the people in the shops actually looked pretty cool. We found ridiculously huge sunglasses and bought a pair each to help us fit in. We then had to pose with them on and doing the peace sign in photos to be more Japanese. When we were wearing them in a club a Japanese guy came up to Chris and asked to try them out. So they helped us to make friends. We also tried out Karaoke as it is very popular all over Asia. We got a small private room with funky lights which came on when someone was singing. We were a bit worried at first as all the directories were in Japanese but they brought us an English one and we had lots of fun singing away to the likes of Monty Python, S Club 7 and 50 cent. If there were karaoke places that cool in England we all thought we'd be big fans!

(.....continued on Hong Kong page......)