Arrival

Japan is a fascinating place. I had thought so for years, but in an abstract sort of way. To be honest, I never really thought I would get to Japan. It always seemed too far away and too expensive to seriously plan visiting. However, life is a funny thing. You get older, get a job, get married and suddenly you find yourself actually buying tickets and planning to go somewhere that had for so long seemed so distant. Now, I'm a pretty nerdy dude, so I had been reading about Japan since grade school. Mostly this stemmed from a typical young boy's interest in World War 2, abetted by memories of strange cartoons like Star Blazers and Battle of Planets, which I later learned were different from American cartoons for a good reason. From a very early age the country was part of my conscious, but again, in a fairly distant and abstract way.
   Of course, growing up in the eighties, Japan as an economic force was an omnipresent theme. The fear of an ascendant Asian Tiger buying up all of an America that was in solid stagnation was as common as the present fears aimed at China, and stemmed from the same insecurities, hand wringing and suspicion that we see expressed today. Anti-Asian xenophobia and racism  has a long and storied history in this country, particularly against the Chinese. However, that was mainly because they were the first to come in great numbers. As the internment camps of WW2 proved, as soon as the Japanese made it into our domestic awareness, thanks to Pearl Harbor, we were quite capable of making up for lost time and able to come up with something equally as insidious as the Chinese experience at Angel Island. Post war, insofar as Japan entered anyone's thinking at all, being so far away from the average American in every sense, they seem to have been put in a different category than, say, a resurgent Germany after the Second World War. At best, Japan was no more than just a backdrop, a pop culture shorthand for exotic or alien. From "Walk, don't run" with Cary Grant; a Peter Sellers line in "Dr. Strangelove" (strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras); eighties cheese like "Black Rain", (which in tasteful fashion was the phrase used by the Japanese to describe nuclear fallout from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, draw your own comparisons to a rockin' Micheal Douglas movie); positive horrors like "Rising Sun"; even in the present with "Lost in Translation" where the country was essentially used as a metaphor for alienation. It was basically a fantastical place where people wore funny clothes and from which radios magically appeared. They didn't look like we did, they didn't work like we did, didn't eat what we did. Personally, I found those differences exciting, and I found the history of Japan and the road to its unique place in the world fascinating. I loved reading stories about "those wacky Japanese" (most of them as true as your average urban legend over here). Loved their cartoons. Loved their gadgets (as any self respecting Walkman owning child of the eighties should). And eventually came to love their food, though I'll admit that did come a bit later.
  Over the years, I had developed a sort of informal list of places that at some point just had to be seen. Luckily, Holly, the wife and travel companion also shares a solid interest in travel. To a large degree her thinking and mine on places on "the List" are pretty much in line, which is good because she tends to prod me to get off my ass so we can actually go see some of these places rather than just talk about one day going. Japan, of course, was one of the shining jewels on that list, but was actually fairly low down because of the perceived expense and complexity of getting there. Lets face it, if you're prioritizing, being able to do an entire trip to Peru for not much more than the cost of the tickets to Japan tends to skew your thinking. Regardless, we knew that as we got older and started thinking about kids it was only going to get harder to go, so we finally moved it to the top of the list.
  We were somewhat hamstrung by Holly's work schedule, she works at a college and that tends to create a specific window on the calender. Sadly, this meant we would be going in August. Which brings me to the first bit of advice, should you ever go to Japan: do not go in August. Aside from the fact that its un-holy-hell-friggen hot and humid, it also adds a pretty hefty chunk to the cost of flying. A month later and we coulda saved a pretty good bit right up front. But, you play the cards you're dealt, etc., so come the crack of August, we were off. The flight was unlike any I'd been on, given the length and direction, it lead to an entire day of endless night. This was perhaps good, as the jet lag was almost non-existant, arriving at a vaguely morning-ish hour meant internal clocks seemed to not notice there was something completely screwy with the calender. We ended up flying into Haneda, the closer of the two airports serving Tokyo (the other being Narita, which is a bit more common to fly into, apparently), this meant it was a quick jaunt on the monorail to the Yamanote Line (the big Japan Rail ring line, very convenient) to get to Tokyo Station to activate our Japan Rail passes. As a first introduction to trains in Japan, it was impressive. I had been a bit worried about this, because though my reading had spoken of the trains and how they were wonderfully easy to deal with, it didn't make clear just how mindlessly easy they were. Aside from the signage being in Japanese and English, all the ticket machines had English instructions too. Not that you would have really needed the extra language, as the whole system seems to have been designed so someone who can't read at all can figure it out. Wonderful stuff.

Sadly, we were actually a bit screwed by the efficiency of it all. We had arrived around 5:30am, and had picked up our bags, gotten through customs, changed money, and were at Tokyo Station at 6:30am. Try that over here, I dare you. This, of course meant the JR office wasn't open, the Starbucks wasn't open, nothing was open. So with nothing to do but enjoy being in the disgusting humidity of Tokyo, we put the packs in a locker and went for a stroll.

Which was actually pretty cool for a "hey...we're in JAPAN" kinda feeling, but also kinda weird because their time of day was completely outta whack with what the sun was saying. It was before 7 but felt like 10. We were trying to decide if we should go do something to kill the time, but I wasn't sure how tricky it was going to be to get to our first night stop, so decided to head back to the station so we could get moving as soon as possible. We should have been picking up on the fact that it doesn't take long to get anywhere in Japan, but heck we didn't know that yet. By the the time we got back and got coffee, it was time to hit the JR office and 15 minutes later we were on our first Shinkansen. It was just that easy.

Two things I need to rave about at this point. First: the Japan Rail Pass.

Everything we'd read said these were the way to go if you were going to be moving around a bit. At first I thought they were a bit steep, mostly because they are good for consecutive days of travel, and I wanted us covered the entire time. But in the end, they were worth every penny and cheap as chips compared to what the cost of all our traveling woulda been without em'. On top of that, being able to walk up to any station and be waved through for a leisurely stroll to whatever train you needed or wanted to take...just too easy. Excellent value all around.
Second: the Shinkansen, ye olde bullet trains.

I don't care how much you've read or seen about these things, but the first time you see one go by, only the most train hating freak wouldn't feel their heart rate go up. They are just too damned cool. They are everything trains should be: punctual, clean, efficient, smooth, and....well....I gotta repeat myself, just too damned cool.

Its like a jet has landed two feet in front of you at the exact minute (nay...second) its supposed to, a door opens and it departs, again, precisely on time. The only thing better is being on the platform at a station waiting for yours and experiencing a through train passing by, because they don't slow for stations they don't stop at. Cool, cool, cool.
So like a rocket, we were on our way. The next stop was Odawara for our first nights stop, but Im gonna leave it here and get to that in the next post.