2. A bit more Tokyo, then south before heading to the far north

I imagine that a number of customs and behaviours which seemed at first strange to us will rapidly became invisible as we spend longer in Japan and more and more becomes ‘normal’ to us, so topics will appear as if by random in these blogs.  That’ll be because I’ve just remembered something, which to be fair, is about as random as anything can get. 

All of which is a preamble to a number of observations, the first of which is Security Guards.  I have never seen so many.  They are almost without exception quite old men (my age) wear very smart uniforms of dark blue trousers, lighter blue shirts, peaked military style caps or hard hats and carry a truncheon, often dayglo orange.  We’ll be walking past a small building site with nothing on it and there will be three of them, one on each side of the entrance and one by the road.  Their function appears to be to guide lorries in and out and bow to any pedestrian who catches their eye.   Others will be each side of a road to hold up either traffic or walkers so that walkers or traffic get priority.  If this doesn’t really make sense then I’ve written it accurately. 

London Cab Wedding Car 

Now we’ve found that drivers are as polite as people not in vehicles and I will write about those later but drivers have been stopping to let us across the road every time we’re near a crossing and if we’re walking along a narrow road and a car comes up behind us it just follows slowly, no horn , no revving, no effing, until we notice it and sidle out of the way.  Cyclists however are like many cyclists the world over, nutters, and I speak as someone whose number 1 son is a serious cyclist and therefore not a nutter.   Cyclists are allowed to ride on pavements here which are often marked half for pedestrians and half for cyclists.  This is clearly merely optional and furious cycling while weaving in and out of groups of walkers is the norm.  In the road against the traffic is fine.  In the road at night against the traffic with a child on the back and no lights is also fine.

Traditional Wedding

The most obvious thing to notice though is that the vast majority of the people we see are oriental and probably Japanese.  I’ve read that 98.5% of Japan’s population is ethnically Japanese but I’m talking about Tokyo and we’re going to touristy places.  The language is not tonal and all the sounds are used in English (I understand) but emphasis on different syllables can mean different things.  Japanese characters are just impossible.  Anyway, I’m not having any problems learning  Japanese because I’m just not learning Japanese.  A word or two here and there perhaps but it would be ridiculous to try and pick up anything of substance.   I‘ll just have to stick to prostrating myself and wailing that I’m just a barbarian westerner who wants something that I can eat.  You can be served raw horsemeat in some restaurants and Heather has found some information on a shop that sells ice cream in squid ink or sea-urchin flavour.  Even so, I feel the same way about Pork Scratchins’.

Actually we both really like Tokyo and may well come back at the end of our trip, it will be interesting to see how much cooler it is in five weeks.  At present the weather is just like their rice, warm and sticky.

However, before we left Tokyo we spent Sunday around two areas called Shibuya and Harajuka.  Shibuya has a famous extra busy pedestrian and road junction.  When the crossing man goes green

Shibuya Crossing, Sunday morning

(nobody but nobody crosses until he does), people stream 





across each of the roads entering the junction and diagonally across the junction in their hundreds.  Then the crossing police wave stragglers out of the way and the traffic thunders through for a while.  Quite a sight.  Nobody seems to bump into anybody else but I understand that the Japanese are particularly adept at making sure that they don’t.  As a digression, I’d recommend a book called Watching The English by a social anthropologist called Kate Fox which is a look at how we English behave.  One of her experiments was that she tested bumping into people deliberately, which she admits she found personally difficult, and seeing how many of them apologised to her.  Then she did the same in various other countries but found it very difficult to even bump into the Japanese because they’re so skilled at swerving out of the way.

This puppy only £4,800

Harajuka is a very expensive shopping area with loads of Designer Label shops where fashionable people hang out, so being fashionistas ourselves we sashayed along in our walking boots and walking gear to strut our stuff.  We had found the Japanese very quiet but a couple of million of them all out shopping together do make a formidable racket.  There is a very odd style, prevalent here, of strange clothing matched up, a sort of grotesque ‘cute’ schoolgirl/adult look.  Perhaps jeans with a
see through lace tutu topped off with a multi-coloured crochet top with hair in bunches at the side. Plus make up laid on with a trowel.  All a little creepy really.   We did however see a Japanese Jack Sparrow chatting to some Orthodox Jews in their traditional clothes which was wonderfully bizarre.

So, validating our first Japan Rail Pass and heading south to Hakone on the bullet train was the plan.   This wasn’t the whole country rail pass but covered the east and north and we’d got it because we could pick six days out of fifteen to use it instead of the consecutive days on the country wide pass. Got that ?  Anyway, it wasn’t valid for the bullet train to Hakone so we worked out how to get there on the ordinary train instead.  The reason we had thought it was valid is that the map they send you with the tickets when you buy them in England includes the Shinkansen to Hakone.  So it wasn’t unreasonable etc.. etc…

Hakone is a hilly, densely wooded landscape which we got to after changing trains to a slow local one climbing the steep hillside by zig zagging upwards.  We would come to a halt and then chug back almost the way we’d come, performing a number of giant Z’s to get to Gora at the end of the line.  Then steeply upwards carrying our backpacks to the hotel which was set in what seemed to be a residential area with no other facilities.  It did have one, just the one, extraordinary facility about 400 yards further on.  It  was the most wonderful Italian Restaurant, run by Japanese who had lived in Italy.  We had dinner there twice for there was nowhere else.   On the second evening the woman who we took to be the owner and waitress asked to take our photo on her I-Pad.  We smiled and thought no more about it until Heather’s appetiser arrived.  It was on a clingfilm covered I-Pad displaying our photograph.   Cue merriment all round.

We were in a traditional hotel with western and Japanese rooms, very little English spoken, a restaurant with no concession outside Japanese food for dinner or breakfast and a very pleasant piece of lift style classical music playing softly where the internet signal was obtainable.  It was pleasant background music until you suddenly realised it actually only lasted about twenty seconds and then repeated again and again.  Once realised, it was maddening.  

The most obvious part of the traditional here was the careful use of slippers.  Shoes are left at the entrance lobby and you choose a pair of slippers to walk into the hotel.  In our room, there was another pair to change into which are only used in the lavatory and then you change back into your general hotel slippers.  The best part of the hotel though was that it had an Onsen, a spring fed hot water bath heated by local volcanic activity.   Use of the onsen has an etiquette like so much of Japanese culture and there was a men’s and a women’s onsen here so you bathe naked.  You shower well next to the bath which was about fifteen feet by six and about two feet deep and then lower yourself gently into very hot water.  It is an onsen social faux pas to drop your tiny towel into the water so it sits folded on top of your head.  About ten minutes was enough and I certainly didn’t use the even hotter sauna which was next to it.  It was as you might expect very relaxing.

Hakone-en from the lake

One of the big tourist attractions in the area is a circuit starting with a funicular and then cable car over a big hill and volcanic crater, down to a lake for a ride of about five to ten miles to the other end on a pirate ship, then a bus and finishing with a return on the ziggy-zag train we arrived on.  It was a day we were five minutes late for everything.   The cable car really did go across a steaming volcanic crater and we were solemnly issued with a ‘protection against fumes’ pack which was a medically sealed plastic bag containing a wet cloth to hold across our faces if the smell  got too bad.  There was also a notice pointing out that the volcano was beyond their control which we thought was fair enough as people seem to expect everything to be tamed and Disneyfied these days.  We thought we would be going higher and could have a bit of a hike at the top but no such luck and frankly it was all a bit tame.

At Hakone Open-Air Museum

The big attraction for us in the area was The Hakone Outdoor Museum which was the most
impressive parkland full of top notch sculpture set in a landscape of dramatically wooded hills.  We were lucky to have it bathed in sunshine as well.   Even the entrance was impressive, going down by escalator, along a short tunnel and out in the park with sculpture in plenty of space all around.   There was also a Picasso gallery with some particularly good stuff (as us aficionados call it) on display.  Then just as we left, I realised 
my faithful walking pole had been left 
behind somewhere.  

So I went back in, thought about it, remembering the last place I knew I had it and hotfooted it to the café, a great modern glass affair.  There was my pole just where I’d left it leaning against the corner of two glass walls glued together.  It had been there for three hours.