Peter met me at my hotel and we shared a taxi and plane to Tokyo. The whole of Beijing is irrationally frenetic about the taking of temperature these days, and the airport is anything but an exception. The travel downturn is evident, Peter says, by the fact that we didn’t have to wait an entire hour for our exit visas. We fixed a 2.5 bug on the way.
There’s a bus that goes from Narita to Shinjuku Station and then to our hotel, every hour, and we arrived at just the right time to change some money, buy a ticket, and get on board. For someone who has never been to Tokyo before, like myself, the drive is pretty fascinating. I was much too enthralled to take photographs, because I’m an idiot, but the interweb will hopefully bail me out in this respect. In the meantime, consider New York City, only 5 times as dense.
We drive on highways stacked on top of each other, four deep, so that our bus is driving some 100 feet high, at the level of some very tall buildings. I see many very elegant buildings, with walls of curved glass and stone, packed tightly together in that very Tokyo stereotype, but also some small parks and squares.
In a few places closer to downtown, it becomes clear that there are really multiple levels to Tokyo, and that in many places there are multiple “ground-level” entrances to a single building; either by stacking streets on top of each other or by digging a building into a hill (or adding a hill around a building?) to provide each floor with an entrance. Pretty neat.
After we checked in, we walked a short way to an electronics district that Peter remembered from some previous trips, which after dark is a somewhat dazzling display of streetside lighting. On the inside, this building is like the Honest Ed’s of electronics — except about three times bigger. Alternatively, you could think of it as a Fry’s — except three times bigger. This store doesn’t just have laptops, it has a hundred kinds; it doesn’t just have digital cameras, it has one of each, all the way up to the $30,000 professional series. Likewise for PDAs, networking gear, pieces parts, monitors, home cinema, mobile phones, blah blah blah.
We checked out various slightly-ahead-of-the-curve Japanese delicacies–by which I mean we spent two hours covering every inch of the six full floors of geekery–before our stomachs got the better of us and we were forced to flee in the direction of where we hoped to find food.
Nearby Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, was more or less finished with rush hour but still comfortably busy nonetheless. A nice woman told us which of the eight or more tracks we wanted to take to Shubuya (the Japan Railroad green Yamamoto line, as it turns out), and we took the quiet, fast, clean, you’ve-heard-it-all-before train a few stops. The little machines which sell you the tickets are perfect shining jewels of user interface, and it was immediately obvious to me how to use them despite never having done so before, and not being able to read Japanese. We discovered on our way home that some of them have a button to switch between English and Japanese prompts, although it’s almost unnecessary.
The only vague analogy to the main Shubuya square would be Times Square, but even that is a pale, puny thing in comparison. Where Times Square has one small video screen, Shubuya has three enormous displays, one of which is the entire side of a huge building, the lightbulbs inserted into the glass with plenty of space for the officeworkers inside to look out. While Times Square at midnight is bright enough to be noon, Shubuya is bright enough to be the surface of the sun. You are assaulted by glowing and moving advertising on every possible surface, plus some new surfaces created just for this purpose, all made somehow more soothing by the fact that I can’t read them.
In Shubuya we walked for a while, trying to predict the perfection awaiting us through each door, striving for the real deal for our single dinner in Tokyo. Because most menus are exclusively in Japanese–and also because we’re in motherfucking Japan–the goal was absolutely to stuff our sushi holes, deviation from which would not be tolerated. Not unlike my French, my command of Japanese, such as it is, is entirely limited to the names of fish, rolls, and appetizers, each syllable practically guaranteed to bring more joy than the last. I was psyched.
Our final choice (a desperate wish, really, fueled by hunger) was perfect. A dozen stools around a central island where two chefs stood reacting to the calls of the customers with lightning speed, spinning freshly prepared delicacies onto a small conveyor belt with plates colour-coded by price. Much to my delight and surprise, several items which have not tickled my fancy when consumed in North America (among them uni and ikura) were quite different and absolutely delicious here. For whatever reason–perhaps a more stringent commitment to freshness or quality ingredients, perhaps better access to raw materials, or perhaps the purely psychological influence of eating in this room where no English is spoken–this was quite certainly the best sushi I’ve ever eaten. Also the bill for both of us came to some thirty United States of America dollars, despite our very best efforts to glutton ourselves into bankruptcy. Oh, and some sake.
I am thinking very seriously about not going to the airport tomorrow.
