1. Starting in Tokyo, that famous anagram of the former capital Kyoto

Well Japan at last !   After the journey of up at 4.30am, arrival at our hotel after 22 hours to be told we couldn’t book in for a further four hours it felt like ‘at last’.  So we went walkabout first and had our first ever Japanese meal, although I did pass on the crunchy fried conger eel bones and the boiled jellyfish.  Perhaps I will lose some weight after all.  We had been warned that tiny hotel rooms were a likelihood before we arrived and our experience so far is that Tokyo certainly wouldn’t be a good location for the World Cat-Swinging Championships.  Then after finally getting into our tiny hotel room we had a quick alarm set, 30 minutes kip and then out again to explore Asakusa in the evening.   We did have an early night though, going to bed at 32 hours after we got up in our Heathrow bedroom, sleeping for a restless 13 hours and nearly missing breakfast.   Our trouble on these trips is that we hit the ground running and keep running and every time we say to ourselves that we must slow down a bit, chill out, have a day doing nothing (well, very little anyway) now and again.  Perhaps this time, we have six weeks after all.

There is no standard definition of what to include in ‘a city’, we Brits include more area than the French do with theirs but whatever measure you use, Tokyo is a whopper with a population of about 38 million, compared to London’s 8.7 million and New York’s 8.5 million.   We took the subway in from the airport which lies off to the north east for a journey of about an hour and a half into somewhere near our hotel.  Part way in, the train stopped and we all had to get out because there had been ‘an incident’ which closed the line and was probably some poor devil under a train.  So we had to re-route ourselves using a map which looked for all the world as if it had been drawn by a demented spider on LSD with eight fistfuls of coloured pencils.  Photo enclosed.   Well obviously we got to the correct hotel eventually and this was a greater success than might have been predicted at Heathrow.  After waiting for a few minutes we realised that we were at the wrong stop for our hotel shuttle and missed the leave time by a couple of minutes.  Not to worry though, this was a British bus and was naturally ten minutes late.

The Tokyo subway map

According to The Book, Lonely Planet, Asakusa has an old Tokyo feel to it but of course we have nothing to compare it with.  It is definitely a really good spot to be located with lots of restaurants, shops, great transport links and an incredible Buddhist Temple complex,  Senso-Ji.  Lots of bright red, big bells, grimacing statues and impressively sweeping roof lines with a strong hint of incense.

As I mentioned, we’re in Japan for six weeks and could probably use it all up in Tokyo although we have no intention of doing so.  Our plan such as it is will include the northernmost big island of Hokkaido where the Winter Olympics have been held and the sea sometimes freezes in winter.  It’s probably far enough north to sometimes see the Northern Lights but if we do we’re hoping they’re not North Korean ones.  We’re hoping to see some autumn colour and some wildlife.   In the other direction, we’re hoping to get to the southernmost big island of Kyushu which is sub-tropical.  So, we’re in Tokyo for four nights and hope to get a good feel for the place, vast though it is but our ‘plan’ is always flexible enough to spend time back here at the end of our trip if we choose to.

We’ve just learned that there is a British style cake shop in Tokyo run by expat Brits which they’ve chosen to call Mornington Crescent.   This will mean absolutely nothing to a number of you but others will laugh and still more others will nod sagely because they understand the joke.

There will be a theme which will probably run through all these blogs and that’s what seem like oddities to us but of course are just a different culture’s way of behaving.  One of the biggest reasons to travel.  Things which we noticed immediately were that although we knew that driving was on the left as per Britain so is standing on an escalator whereas we stand on the right.  Litter appears to be virtually non-existent although we have seen groups of smartly dressed people with tongs picking some litter from flowerbeds.  So many shop doors are automatic, the ones that aren’t tend to have notices saying ‘Manually Operated Door’ and generally the doors slide open rather than swing.   As you would expect in a country noted for politeness, queuing is de rigeur.  At bus stops a neat queue of individuals will stand parallel to the kerb with their backs to the oncoming traffic.  There is no pushing and personally I consider the ability to queue properly one of the most notable marks of a civilised society.  Any fat lout can push an old lady out of the way but civilised behaviour is about taking other people into consideration.  On the subway, lines form at right angles to the platform where floor markings indicate precisely where the train will stop and when a train does so, the queue parts to let passengers get off.  Wonderful.   Bowing of course is universal but I’ll write about that in a later blog.

Senso-ji Temple

 

Senso-ji at night

Traditional dress with obligatory 'selfies'

On our first full day, still a bit dazed and glazed from jet lag, we set out into the bus and subway system.  I knew doing those ‘Master level’ Sudokus would come in handy somewhere.   Just exploring really but heading towards two areas called Ueno (large park, National Museum) and Yanesen (temples by the score, cemetery and older buildings).   Turned out to be a piece of cake, just like Andersen’s Bakery in Ueno’s main station which had some lovely bread and cakes although some of the baked items had clearly been adapted for a Japanese palate, Curry Doughnut anyone ?   Actually we’d bought yet another ‘pass’ for Tokyo transport which was like London’s Oyster card and it turned out to be very useful.   We arrived in Japan with two main line train passes which includes travel on the Shinkansen, known to us all as The Bullet Train, so now we have three passes each.

You would think that a park is a park is a park unless there were obvious design differences which there weren’t but to us this one was just so non-western, maybe it was the species growing or the pruning or subtle differences in layout.  Maybe it was that being so interested in plants we were more tuned in, as it were, but it definitely felt different.    In front of a large ornamental pond was a set of tents as part of a food festival and a stage with a group of young women wearing beautiful

kimonos, walking up and down in what looked like a choreographed display.  The incongruity was the single westerner amongst them who was about six inches taller than everyone else.  We saw our first Buddhist monks since we arrived, all shaven headed and wearing saffron coloured robes.  I believe they all take a vow of poverty and these days that’s clearly taken as meaning ‘including an Iphone’.   The National Museum was for another day and we headed into the area with the temples.  Lots of temples, tucked down every side street it seemed and many with graveyards.  Every grave had a sheaf of wooden boards standing vertically with inscriptions written on them.  Each board was about five feet high with rounded corners, 5 inches or so wide and a quarter of an inch thick.  They looked very much like giant ice-lolly sticks and clattered in a breeze.  This was the area in which we came across the workshop and gallery of Allan West, a softly spoken artist from Washington DC who lives in Japan and produces the most exquisite traditional artwork, mixing his paints from raw materials.  

Allan West at work

 The most spectacular were the large room divider screens at £35,000 or so a piece.  The posture he painted in looked agonising to us.  Whatever he was working on lay flat on the floor while he was on a rolling platform which was held several inches above the work and which he inched forwards as work progressed.  He sat with his legs to one side, leaning forwards and slightly sideways to paint below his own body level while supporting his upper body by an elbow on one knee.  He told us that he’d got used to it.

Graveyard with those memorial sticks