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June 2, 2001 - The Day The Camera Broke
I feel I did a pretty good job avoiding the dreaded jet lag.
In the past, I've usually managed to arrive overseas and last just until noon
on the first full day without falling asleep. By holding out and going to sleep
at about 11:30 PM last night, I think I may just have beat it... except, even
though my sleep is close to normal, my stomach is not. Come 7:00AM, 11:00AM and
7:00PM Arizona time my stomach loudly declares it's feeding time. (That's
11:00PM, 3:00AM and 11:00AM Japan time).
Therefore, I awoke between 3:00 and 4:00AM, starving. By
4:00, it was bright enough to see, and I could get my first good look at Tokyo
from our 21st floor window. As far as the eye could see, which wasn't all that
far considering how murky the air was, there was nothing but gray, multi-story
buildings, expanding out beyond the range of sight. A skyline of buildings
without end, and from this height, not many buildings obscured the view so it
was a long vista. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's downright ugly.
Feeling hungry, I took to the streets on my own to look
around and locate food.
 My
first order of business was to get a good solid GPS (Global Positioning System)
lock on the hotel in case Tokyo's legendary ability to get people lost caught
Chu-Wan and I off guard, at least I'd be able to get a good bearing back to the
hotel. I also intended to fix subway locations so that, if lost, we wouldn't
have to walk all the back o the hotel, just to the nearest subway.
The 7-11 near the hotel had a series of sandwiches and bento
meals that, frankly, didn't look too appealing. Hunger overcame reluctance and
I purchased a "I-don't-know-what-this-is" sandwich, and headed back to the
hotel. The sandwich turned out to be a fried chicken patty and wasn't too bad,
but I was left wanting more soon.
There was a letter from Singapore Air's agent in Tokyo
explaining everything we needed to know, including who to contact to arrange
our transportation back to the airport, exactly which bus we needed to catch,
etc. It was all very efficient and well done - more brownie points to Singapore
Air.
Part of the package was a half-day tour of Tokyo. I'm not
really fond of these bus tours, but, with the limited time we had in Tokyo, it
made sense that we'd at least get to say we'd seen a few things that we'd never
get to on our own. Our instructions were to meet near the Bell Captain's desk
at 7:20 to meet the 7:30 tour bus.
Part of the tour description said we'd be doing a "drive-by"
of the Diet (Japanese parliament) building. I wasn't sure when they were going
to hand out the guns, but it sounded like an interesting way to spend the
morning.
Someone signed up for the tour was a little late so we
didn't get away till 7:50, but I didn't care, we were on the move and starting
our tour.
Sort of...
In fact, we had to stop at 6 more hotels to pick up more
tourists, which took two more hours.
About 9:15 we stopped at one hotel and an American couple
boarded the bus. They sat behind us and I was really amused that the husband
proceeded to bitch to his wife how they were 10 minutes late picking them up
and now the tour would be delayed. Frankly, I wish the SOB had gotten on the
bus 2 hours earlier so he could have suffered with the rest of us as he
deserved - he was getting off easy. (I mean, really, if you're going to gripe
about stuff, why not just set up a web page and do it right?)
 Actually, he was a comical little fellow, and he spent time
explaining to his wife things that surprised him about Tokyo. Most of which
were not worth noting, but one thing was: He commented on vending machines.
Apparently, he had heard the same tales that I had that anything was
ilable in vending machines in Tokyo. He had not witnessed this, having only
seen soda and beer. I started thinking about it and realized that I could only
add condoms to the list of things I had seen in street corner vending machines.
Admittedly, I'd only been looking for two or three hours but determined that
I'd catalog everything I saw. Of course, our friend also pointed out to his
wife that you only ever saw vending machines on the back streets and never on
the main streets. (He said this oblivious to the fact that we were driving past
a bank of 6 machines as he spoke.)
Speaking of observations, while we were riding around
aimlessly on the pre-tour bus, Chu-Wan mentioned that you didn't see any
scooters on the streets. Taipei is awash with them and she was surprised that
Tokyo was without.
Seconds later we saw a scooter darting along next to our bus
and then pulled out in front of us. Our bus then promptly hit him. The bus
slammed to a sudden stop and the driver looked out the front window. The
scooter drivers hand beckoned up from the front of the bus and then he picked
himself up off the pavement and rode off.
Another good reason not to ride scooters. In a fair fight,
buses win.
We transferred to the tour bus and the tour proper began. We
drove by the Diet building and we could see there was a field trip of school
children there, then we swung by the Asakasa Detached Palace and stopped for a
few moments.
 The Asakasa Detached Palace is now used as the Royal Guest House. It
was built during the Meiji period (Late 1800, early 1900s) and was intended to
show the rest of the world that Japan, freshly out of 2 hundred years of
isolation, was a progressive, modern society. It was designed similar to the
palace of Versailles, and as such, doesn't offer any great insights to Japanese
style palaces.
Our next stop was the Meiji Shrine. Built in honor of the
late emperor Meiji, it is set in a huge, beautiful park in the middle of the
city, populated with over 200,000 trees, all of which were donated from all
over Japan. So dense are the trees that it's hard to believe that it was an
"artificial" forest.
 At the entry
to the shrine stands the largest wooden tori gates in Japan. (I suspect
that means the largest in the world also.) According to our tour guide, Atsuko,
each gate pillar is from a single Japanese Cyprus tree. They are so big that
they didn't have trees that big is Japan and they had to be felled in Taiwan.
(She didn't mention that was probably done during the Japanese colonial
occupation of Taiwan in the first part of this century.) The shrine was packed
with tourists, including a group of school children on a field trip, I couldn't
tell if they were the same ones from the Diet building or not.
When we got to the shrine we discovered that a wedding was
in progress. The bride and groom in all their traditional Shinto finery were
walking through the courtyard. The tourists, including ourselves, were snapping
away the pictures.
This is where we discovered that the 35mm camera was dead,
possibly a victim of the United Air gorillas that bounced our luggage around.
If we're lucky, it's just a battery. Nonetheless, we've no camera but the
digital and it only has 30 pictures until I have to return to the hotel and
unload it to the computer - not the most ideal situation.
 Our next stop was the Tokyo Tower, which is
333 meters tall, or approximately 1100 ft tall. I probably annoyed Chu-Wan by
constantly repeating a line from a presentation my friend David and I had to
make in Japanese class a few years ago. "Tokyo Towa wa san hyakku, san jyu
san meta desu." (Toyko Tower is 333 meters.) The tour included a trip to
the first level observation platform (also known as "the gift shop".)
Nonetheless, you had a great view of Tokyo from here, if you could fight your
way to a window, past yet another group of school children on a field trip.
With a 360 degree panorama of Tokyo there was nothing
to be seen except high-rises as far as the eye could see. Tokyo is huge (and
gray)! The sky hadn't cleared up and so you could not see far enough to get
past the city itself. My hopes of seeing Mt. Fuji from Tokyo were crushed
forever. They say it's a rare day that Fuji can be seen from Tokyo and I can
believe it. I'm not sure what was in the air, whether it was pollution, fog or
something else, but it hung like a permanent fixture over the city.
We lost a few people at Tokyo Tower and that put the tour
off schedule while Atsuko tried to track down 3 or 4 people in the crowd of
hundreds. They had broken from the tour and paid to go to a higher observation
platform so it took a while to find them. To the tour company's credit, at
least they didn't ditch them at the tower - although they did deserve it.
 Next we
headed to the East Garden of the Imperial Palace, the only part of the palace
open to the public. The palace is surrounded by a moat, in which people were
renting boats and fishing, and then the grounds themselves have fortified
castle walls. These stone walls are at least 15 feet thick and 20 or more high.
Inside is another beautiful garden, and today the Azaleas and Irises were in
bloom and there were many photographers out trying to capture the beauty.
Our last stop was the Ginza where the tour ended and they
left us. I got a good GPS fix on the Ginza subway station so we could find our
way home and we headed off in search of lunch.
Food prices in Tokyo seem to vary wildly. One place a $3
meal in the US would cost 1500 yen (or about US$12.50), in other places, the
same meal might be 1000 yen (or $8.35) or even a bit less. I never saw anything
that wasn't twice as expensive as I'd expect in the US. Some things were so
expensive that you had to look three times at the prices to believe them. We
saw some meals that cost over US$50 that shouldn't have cost $5... you must be
paying for an awful lot of ambience at those restaurants - although they didn't
appear to be swanky places at all.
Next door to the McDonald's, which was packed, was a
steakhouse, plastic food sitting on display (as with almost all restaurants in
Japan) with the prices. The prices looked reasonable - not even terribly
expensive for the US, so we decided to try it.
The place had no customers at all, which was sending a
warning off in my head: "Danger, danger food place, no customers, noon, busy
shopping street (the Ginza), all the other restaurants are packed! What do they
know that you don't?"
The waiter didn't speak English and, of course, tried to
address Chu-Wan in Japanese. This was our first encounter with the "Chu-Wan
looks Japanese and I look like a Gaijin" phenomena which kept everyone talking
to her and not me. Ironic, since my Japanese is better than hers.
Using Chu-Wan's ability to read Chinese characters and my
ability to read Kana characters, we were able to make an informed lunch
decision. I had a full meal, which included salad, rice, soup, corn, some other
vegetables, a teriyaki grilled boneless chicken breast and a hamburger steak in
a peppersauce. Chu-Wan had a similar meal with only grilled beef chunks and all
the other trappings, total bill was only 1,533 yen, or $12.75 Economical, based
on Tokyo prices. It was really good and we could not figure out why the place
was deserted. With luck, maybe we'll go back there on another day.
We did a little shopping and returned to the hotel. Our
original plan was to visit the Ueno Zoo and see Ling Ling the Giant Panda, but
with the 35mm camera broken, I wanted to try to get it fixed or replaced before
we went.
Checking out the camera as best I could, it looked like the
battery may have been discharged. I had replaced it not too long ago, and
checked it before I packed it, but, all the signs of a dead battery were there.
We decided to buy a new battery in the hopes that would fix it, and, buy a
disposable 35mm just in case.
I left the cameras behind and went to Tobu department store,
the largest in Tokyo and second largest in the world. Tobu, and nearby Seibu
were once the #1 and #2 largest in the world, but Seibu opened a larger store
in Yokohama.
It's hard to believe there is a larger department store.
Tobu is huge, it spans three buildings which have been merged together at every
level to create a long, single building. To describe it, at least to my Arizona
readers, picture, if you will, a Department store of large size in Arizona or
California. Tobu is like that - on one floor. Tobu has 8 floors, and 3 basement
levels, with a subway station in it. It would take us days to look over the
entire store. Instead, I decided to head for the toy section. (Mitsukoshi on
the Ginza had been a bust in the toy department.)
When I arrived I was instantly annoyed that I'd left the
cameras behind. The superhero Ultraman was entertaining the kids in the toy
section along with Red King. My guess is that these were real costumes from the
TV shows and I was struck at how short Ultraman really is. He should be 30
meters tall, but was actually only about 5'5". Red King, a Godzilla-like
monster, who has a long tail actually had a "minder" following him around to
prevent his tail from wrecking the toy displays. Later Ultraman and Red King
had been replaced with a mecha-robot that I could not identify.
Not having enough department store size shock, we went to
Seibu also and looked around.
Later we bought a battery and a disposable camera at a
corner camera store, which seems to have resolved the problem. I cleared out
the remainder of the roll of pictures that were in the camera and started a new
roll, just in case. It will be at least until we are in Taiwan before we learn
if the camera really worked. Fortunately, so far, Tokyo isn't very picturesque
and our picture count is low. I've barely even turned on the camcorder.
At 7:00PM neither of us could stay awake any longer and we
crashed for the night. |
