There’s lot’s more to see in Tokyo, but I’d like to start this post not with the regular day by day, but by sharing. That’s because some of our best memories from Japan aren’t in the places we visited, but in the day to day exploration of their strange culture. Perhaps you already suspected this, but the Japanese are really weird – and I mean every day weird, not just the stuff with the tentacles. As American’s, we found the total lack of Roman or Christian history to be really strange, but we found the whole concept of “face” or “loss of face” to be beyond indecipherable. Japanese society seems to be governed by a whole set of invisible rules, dictating everything from body language to how to eat rice, and any deviation might result in loss of face.
In practice, not knowing the rules leaves you feeling like you accidentally walked into a strangers house – you recognize everything in there, but at the same time it’s arranged completely different. As an example, for the first few days all the cashiers would frown deeply at me or suddenly become hostile half way through a transaction and I couldn’t figure out why. Or we would walk up to restaurants or shops and be unable to figure out how to open the door, and people inside would just be staring at us through the glass like we were nuts. Eventually things did improve as we slowly figured out the rules, and some of that knowledge is what I’d like to share. So, while you enjoy the view from Tokyo Tower (the start of our tour day), here are some of the things we learned about Face, and how not to act politely in Japan.
All doors slide sideways instead of push or pull, and many have a hard-to-find electric button you have to press. It’s disrespectful to hand someone an object with one hand, especially money, you have to hold the object in your right hand with your left cupped underneath. Leave your shoes at the door, sometimes even in public places like museums, and wear slippers for inside. Use a completely different pair of slippers for the toilet. Text reads right to left and vertically down the columns, sometimes even the stuff that has been translated into English. Only the worst tourists ask for western silverware, and it’s actual considered an insult at nicer restaurants. Never seat yourself at a restaurant – someone needs to invite you in and direct you to a seat, even if it’s literally the cook shouting from the kitchen.
With chopsticks, never hold them in a fist, never pierce your food with them, never stick them into the rice bowl and leave them, and don’t leave them in the side of a bowl between bites. Don’t shake hands, if you reach your hand out like you want to shake, most Japanese will panic – bow mutually instead. In fact, just bow for everything, don’t even skip a bow for getting your change back at the 7eleven. Don’t bow too deeply though, or people will think you’re mocking them. Avoid eye contact with everyone unless you have exchanged a lot of bows and mutually acknowledged each other. Even if someone understands English, they are often too embarrassed to try speaking English back to you for fear of making a mistake, so they just bow over and over and indicate what you want until you politely leave them alone. If you can’t find the sink in the bathroom, the toilet is the sink.
Anyway, enough about all that, just remember that the world is a strange place. You’re looking at the view from half-way up Tokyo Tower, our first stop of day 3. We only paid for the viewing platform about ⅔’s of the way up, since the top was quite expensive, but the view was still absolutely face melting. And, as a bonus, it also featured a shrine to Amatersu Oomikami, Goddess of the Sun, to whom you can pray for prosperity in business and the safety of all those involved in broadcast and tourism (according to the sign). For further evidence that the Japanese are weird, the Tower even has an amusement park dedicated to it’s official mascot, the anime “One Piece”, and the view deck includes an inexplicable box, called the “Love Power Spot”, which apparently is the highest power spot in the city! You just never know what you’re going to see in Japan.
After the Tower, we walked a short distance away to Zojoji Temple, which you’ll notice is a Temple (Buddhist), not a Shrine (Shinto). This was our first ever Buddhist Temple so we didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t unlike a Catholic church – just with Buddha instead of Jesus and a ton of incense. Unlike Shinto shrines where you toss money and clap and pray from the outside, we could actually enter this Temple and check out all the golden Buddha paraphernalia. Later, we came to learn that this was a western-style Temple and more traditional Temples are far more inscrutable, but those later temples also lacked an awesome view of Tokyo Tower from the grounds. Out back, we found a lovely little garden full of cute kids statues. We took a bunch of pictures before we translated the sign into broken English and realized it was a cemetery dedicated to unborn children. Yikes!
After our hurried exit from Zojoji, we headed over to my most anticipated attraction in all of Tokyo. Following a series of incredible elevated train rides all the way across the city, we arrived at the Tokyo Harbor district. Unlike other cities where their body of water is the sexiest part, Tokyo’s was kind of boring and neglected. So, to liven the place up, they built the universe’s biggest shopping mall and added a couple of outrageous statues. Spoiler alert; we aren’t here for the shopping mall. We asked ourselves, how could you visit Tokyo and not see the life sized Unicorn Gundam statue? I think the answer is self-evident.
It’s 65ft tall and freaking awesome. Obviously the very first thing you’re wondering though, is why it’s called Unicorn Gundam when it doesn’t have a uni-horn – well that’s obviously because it literally transforms between two modes, Unicorn and Destroyer! We saw it in Destroyer form, but it alternates between the two modes several times a day. We didn’t get to see this part, but at night it even has a song and video that were made specially to accompany the statue. Truly the kind of thing you could only see in Japan.
Here’s a video of it transforming! Its a long video, but just watch the first 1 minute to see transform twice with the full light effects.
After taking the compulsory walk between Unicorn Gundam’s legs, we ended up going inside the mall to visit Mobile Suit Gundam HQ, which is just a huge Gundam fan store, and eating lunch in the food court. We also walked around the harbor district for a bit and saw the other, no less weird but far less impressive, statue in the area. Not unlike the original, it was a gift from the French in 1998 as a tribute to good ties between the two nations. Except theirs is only 40ft tall, though it does have a nice place by the harbor.
In the evening, just so we could have the full cultural experience, we decided to get plastered on Sake. We bought access to an “all you can drink” Sake bar, thinking we were going to get some classy, catered experience. Really, it was just a room full of high top tables and a row of coolers where you they let you pour yourself infinite Sake into a variety of cute little saucers. In short, it was fabulous. They even allowed outside food, so I ventured out to buy us Japanese cheeseburgers so we could just keep on drinking. After a solid 5 hours of continuous Sake, of every temperature and flavor description possible, we finally called it quits and tried to stagger over to a gay bar.
That proved to be a greater challenge than expected on a random Tuesday night, and the first few bars we tried were closed, empty, bereft of gays, or all of the above. Eventually we got lured in by some drag queens who spoke reasonable English into what proved to be a gay karaoke bar. In fairness though, all Japanese bars are karaoke bars waiting to happen. The highlight of the evening was a drunk guy who told us he spoke only 5 words of English. That prompted us to count how many words we knew in Japanese, and we all ended up screaming “KONICHIWA! ARIGATO!”, and counting on our fingers while the poor drag queen tried to sing. We made it to 5 Japanese words, but only because he generously counted “Tokyo” and “Osaka” as words. No doubt the drag queen thought it was hilarious too.
The next day proved to be a slow one as the Sake and jet lag teamed up to kick our butts. We only made two stops all day, the first one being Tokyo National Museum, at the bright and early hour of 3pm. In hindsight, we wish we had more time at this surprisingly good museum, but I don’t think we physically could have gotten there any sooner. My personal favorites were the sensationally cool folding screens, the sweet helmets on the original Samurai armor sets, and the nearly 1000 yr old Samurai swords which still looked sharp enough to do one of those ultra-sharp cuts where the thing falls apart only after a few seconds of dramatic tension. For his part, Jon also liked the beautiful pottery and some hand drawn maps with their strange, old Eastern perspectives. We closed the place down at 5:30 and had to literally run to return our audio guides in time.
For dinner, Jon found us an incredibly good ramen bar that proved to be the best we had in Tokyo. I don’t know how they season that broth, but man is it good. After that, we crossed town on the train specifically to see the Buddhist Temple Senso-ji, because we heard it was cool at night. Indeed, the 5-story Pagoda in that joint pretty much rules from every angle. More importantly, however, was that the Temple sold Kau Chim, which are basically Chinese fortune sticks. You shake a little canister full of numbered sticks, pull one out, then take your fortune from a tiny drawer with the corresponding number on it. Apparently, there are traditionally 100 different possible outcomes, all written in archaic Buddhist Poetry which have to be interpreted by the monks.
This one had like 5 outcomes and our fortunes were printed on recycled newspaper with a busted English translation, which is probably close enough. Poor Jon got “The last and small fortune”, while I got “excellent good fortune” proclaiming I was a real splendid man, superior to all. What other outcome would you expect?
OK, that’s it for Tokyo! We didn’t climb Mt.Fuji because of the weather, but we did overhear a shockingly obnoxious family from New Jersey, loudly arguing about who made it to the summit over breakfast at Denny’s. Let me tell you, Denny’s is not the same in Japan. Anyway, after Tokyo we had planned to head north to the “Japanese Alps”, but when we looked at the weather forecast in Denny’s it showed literally 7 straight days of rain in the mountains. So instead, we are headed almost due west towards Kyoto and Osaka, with a few stops on the way. So see you Nagoya!
