Our time in Tokyo is drawing to a close now, as we prepare to depart for Mount Fuji and then on to Kyoto. I shaln't bore you with the details of our urban adventures but will outline some of the experiences for my own future reflection:
The day after horror-night we went to meet up with about 20 HC members for a 'party' in a really nice park by the river outside of central town and a real obstacle course to get to for someone on their first Tokyo day. The logistics are a bit tricky on account of this place have 2 seperate underground systems and 2 seperate above-ground train systems. And I don't mean just seperate trains, or ownership, I mean tracks, ticket systems, the lot. Wholly distinct entities that between them conspire to carve up hapless tourists in a Kafka-esque nightmare of twisting tunnels and conflicting signs. We have sussed it now and actually it is surprisingly straight forward and logical once you get the fundamental brinciple. A bit like calculus I guess. The party was top - we were fed and watered adn everyone was so friendly to us that we felt at home very quickly. And we would never have seen that part of town otherwise, so it was nice to get off the tourist trail. The whole thing was organised by Mochan, a young fella who is a realy force of nature, the kind of person who just enthuses relentlessly at the world until it gives in and becomes a better place. We are staying with him near Mt Fuji and it will be great to spend some more time chatting.
We left the party late afternoon and headed into town to visit the human circus that is Harajuku, one of the main centres for the bizarre fashion of CosPlay where people dress up to be seen as their celebrity hero from real life, moveis or manga. Very Japanese, wierd from a western perpective but not so much when you remember that these folks just do not have the same sense of sin and repression as Europeans do. There is a darker side however, with a trend towards a sub-sub-culture within CosPlay, based around the concept of Gothic Lolitas and which attracts a surprisingly large number of participants.
On Monday we had a totally different, utterly wonderful time which, in an attempt to inject at least some sense of suspense into this diary, I'm not going to mention (but I expect Ellen will!). Sufficed to say that we were extremely honoured to be able to have that day in our lives. Tuesday was spent largely in Akihabara, an entire district consisting of discount electronics stores, manga palaces, toy and model shops and an increasing number of yet-again-weird cafes where the latest trend is to have waitresses dressed as french maids and who dote upon the clientele to the point of even spoon-feeding them. I get the distinct feeling that female emancipation is up against it here, but as an outsider must remember that my western perspective could be distorting my perceptions. I did not see any cafes advertising fetishistic male waiters who would be subservient to their clientele, at any rate. The evening was spent abandoning plans to find a bookshop, and walking around one of the densest and most commercial parts of inner Tokyo, Shinjuju - particluarly the skyscraper district where much gawping was done. Very Blade-Runner, very imposing and shiny, and very definitely not the place to take up amateur astronomy - this is surely a contender for the most light-polluted place on Earth?
Today we organised our tickets for travel to Mt Fuji, played with many gadgets in the Sony Building in Ginza and somehow I didn't come away with a computer - all is not lost! Too late to see much there we nonetheless headed to the Tokyo National Museum which was huge, very impressive and surprisingly cheap. We only managed to have half an hour but even that was well worth it. If any of you martial arts folks know the answer to this, please let me know: what is the difference between a katana sword and its predecessor, the Tachi, which it began to replace during the Edo period. Both kinds were on display and aside from katanas being displayed blade-up and tachis blade-down I swear I could see absolutely no difference at all: the curve was identical, the length and width were identical, and the hilt settings were identical. I know it is pretty irrelevant but this seeming lack of distiction is driving me nuts - what is the answer?!
After and amazing supper to celebrate our time in Tokyo, in a very tucked away place that seemed to be the Japanese answer to Tapas and which provided one of the top 4 gastronomic experiences in life, we hunted and found a second-hand English bookshop but failed to find the sought-after Korea guide book. Giving up we went to the Kagurazaka district - a small place that foreigners don't seem to go to and which is not mentioned in any of the guides. We went there becasue local advice suggested that it is one of the few places left in Tokyo where we might see geishas if we were lucky. Needless to say that as part of this charmed adventure we were indeed lucky, although the main highlight of the evening was simply scurrying around the tiny alleyways and lanes around this very untouristy and very unmodernised part of town, giving us a brief glimpse of a world almost lost now and hidden well from the new order; of tea houses, secret Japanese courtyards, of invitations we will never recieve and of the magic of Geisha. A most wonderful end to our last full day here, and a great transitory episode on our way to Kyoto.
If we have time we will sight-see on Thursday before our slow-train, maybe to the opened-up imperial gardens just east of the palace and maybe to the sumo district, but either way I'm not sure my heart will be in it as I contemplate leaving this city that has achieved the impossible on a very personal level - it has blended, mostly sympathetically, my 2 great passions which I had always assumed were in opposition to each other; nature and technology. Even despite the recent economic problems this is still a word-leading cutting-edge centre for computer based technology as evidenced in a perfectly precise transport system, amazing modern architecture and electronic wizardry at every turn. At the same time there are very well attended shinto shrines, wonderful parks, protected areas like you just wouldn't get anywhere else and a love and reverence for nature that is the very basis of all everyday expression, particularly in art and cuisine. If Tokyo as capital is representitive of Japan then I have to conclude that although I vaguely disaprove of the most hedonistic, decadent country in the world, and although I simply cannot understand most to-me bizarre Japanese culture on such a short visit, the place has hooked me. I am addicted.