It was nice to get away from Trumplandia for a while. I've been back less than two weeks and my mind has already become cluttered with him again. No way to escape the Orange Menace on television and social media.
I spent three weeks with my family in Japan. Our oldest daughter flew up from Sydney to meet us in Tokyo and from there we toured the country, taking in the bottom half of Hokkaido, the Kyoto area and back to Tokyo. Of course you can only catch a glimpse of a country like Japan in that short a time, like glimpsing Mt. Fuji first on the right side and then on the left as the Shinkansen bullet train sped past Hakone on our return from Kyoto. I had always thought Mt. Fuji was to the east of Tokyo. If nothing else I got a better sense of geography.
So what stuck out to me on this trip? The first was that Tokyo didn't seem like a big city at all despite having nearly 15 million inhabitants. At street level the city seems like any other city, densely packed to be sure, but for the most part low scale with the sun or in our case rain beating down on us. The district we stayed in was mostly residential with houses pressed against each other like a squatters' village. Walls were thin, yet we didn't hear much of what was going on around us as Japanese are pretty quiet.
We did have an eccentric neighbor with a vintage Jeep Willis parked outside his house. Each morning he would come out dressed like Crocodile Dundee ready to take on the world. My son tried to say something to him but he just snorted and climbed into his jeep and drove away. Turns out many Japanese take role playing very seriously and he probably thought my son was making fun of him. He was just trying to compliment him on his jeep.
The train stop was nearby and we took the Tobo Toju local to Shinjuku station, our fist taste of the big city. We had missed rush hour thanks to a late breakfast and hadn't experienced the full effect of the busiest metro station in the world. We would discover that later. It's kind of like Times Square in New York with its LED billboards including a super large cat pushing objects off a glass table onto pedestrians below. He's known as the Shinjuku 3-D Cat and can be viewed every 15 minutes.
The "kids" had planned out our itinerary for the day, in fact for most of the trip, so Daina and I took in Tokyo largely through their eyes. I enjoyed it as I had planned all our trips when they were children, trying to balance their wants with ours, so that we all had an enjoyable trip. I remember our son saying after Greece in 2013 that it was the last family trip he would ever go on. Not that we had a bad time, it's just that he felt he had outgrown these vacations, but here he was happy to be with us again. He brought his girlfriend and they often went in their own direction, while Daina and I ventured around the city with our two daughters.
It wasn't until we took the elevator to the 45th floor of the Metropolitan government building that we got a sense of just how big Tokyo is, spreading out in all directions as far as the eye could see. We had hoped to catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji but it was shrouded in haze. The rain had stopped but it left the air quite humid. The city officials made up for the free elevator ride by tempting viewers with a big shop and cafe atop the Kenzo Tange building from the late 1980s.
Tange was doing mostly corporate architecture by this point. He was the father of the Japanese modern movement, having inspired a style called Metabolism in which buildings could grow much like the city itself. I remember studying it when I was in architecture school. I was a little disappointed to see it reduced to a corporate aesthetic but that's the way it is in contemporary society.
I wasn't pushing my architectural urges on anyone. Instead, the girls guided us to a pig cafe, one of the many animal cafes in the city, where we spent an hour playing with tiny pigs. It was interesting but after five minutes I had enough of sitting in a private room with these micropigs crawling all over me in an effort to get to the box of carrot bits I had in my hand.
We all see cities differently and it was fun to see how Goda and Akvilė saw the city. They had gleaned all the places they wanted to go from Google Maps, checking against viewer ratings, and arguing between themselves as to which was the best udon noodle shop, which they finally agreed upon in Harajuku. I couldn't complain. The noodles were fantastic, made on the spot and served with a carbonara sauce and raw egg floating on top. The restaurants were all quite small, seating anywhere from 8 to 30 persons at one time. We had to wait an hour to get seated, taking in the little neighborhood around us. A German family argued between themselves as to whether it was worth the wait. I could say afterward that it was. Daina and I called it the udon noodle glow. We noticed others coming out with the same expression while we waited in line.
We were happy to have a flat away from Shinjuku City where we could wind down and plan out our itineraries for the next day. There were two showers to speed things along in the morning and a Hitachi washing machine to clean our clothes before moving onto Hokkaido. We worried that we didn't pack warmly enough for the north island. There was a segment on the news showing the first brown bears coming out of hibernation, scratching their backs against the birch trees. The ground still covered in snow. Here we were thinking we were escaping the winter back in Vilnius only to rediscover it in Hokkaido.
More on that later ...
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