It’s 8:25AM on Sunday. We’re back from eating breakfast. Tracie is writing a few postcards while I catch up on blogging. Sorry that I didn’t post more last night but I was so sleepy that I could hardly see straight.
Yesterday started with something of a surprise. The normally quiet restaurant in the hotel where we have breakfast was completely overrun by Chinese tourists. I’m going to try very hard to not be too judgemental here, but there’s no easy way to get around what we observed. I’ve always felt that one is a representative of ones country when one is traveling abroad. You are, in a very real sense, presenting an example of Americans (e.g.) in general if you’re an American visiting Japan, whether or not you think of yourself that way. You’re conveying something about your country to the local residents of another country. I take this aspect of travel fairly seriously, and do my best to represent my country in a positive manner. I hope to leave a positive impression upon people I interact with in other countries because part of how they think about my country will be influenced in at least a tiny measure by what they think of me.
In that light, the throng of Chinese in the restaurant makes me think that I really do not have any interest whatsoever in visiting China. I’m not going to belabor the point here, but these people basically acted like a herd of pigs. I hate to sound judgemental, but I can’t deny what I saw and heard. Japan is the fifth country outside of the U.S.A. that I have had the fortune to visit, and I have never encountered a group of people who acted as uncivilized as this group. Yes, there are differences of culture that are always going to become apparent when borders are crossed, but on the other hand I took the time to try to learn some amount of basic Japanese ettiquette (e.g. table manners) before I came to this country, so why can’t Chinese tourists do the same? Besides, is there any country in which it is generally considered good public table manners to use both hands to stuff an entire pancake into your mouth? I think not. I used to think that the British created the most consistently obnoxious tourist groups, but these people had them beat. We weren’t alone in our impressions; the Japanese staff was clearly somewhat overwhelmed, and a German woman that Tracie spoke to briefly used exactly the same word: uncivilized.
Anyway, moving along: After breakfast we went to Tokyo Station to exchange our vouchers for our Japan Rail passes and to meet Rafael and Richard. It took a little bit of searching to find the correct JR office; Tokyo Station is currently under rennovation and the JR exchange office was neither where it was last year nor was it where our map showed it to be. Nonetheless, we found it with plenty of time to meet Rafael and Richard at the designated area.
In case you’re wondering: Richard is Richard Dudas, a computer-music composer and instructor I met while working for Cycling ’74. He moved to Colorado shortly after I left Cycling ’74 and is now one of Tracie’s and my favorite friends. Rafael is a friend of Richard’s and a resident of Tokyo; Richard did us the favor of introducing us to Rafael when he passed through Colorado late last year. Rafael most kindly offered to show us around Tokyo a bit on our next visit. Of course this was an offer we could not pass up. Richard currently resides in Seoul, Korea and flew over to join us in Tokyo.
Rafael first took us to the Tokyo International Forum, which he described as his favorite building in the world–which is saying something, since he regularly travels internationally for his work. (He works for a company that builds automated printed-circuit board testing systems. We chatted briefly about what he does; I was interested to know what the system uses as a reference for the connectivity testing and guessed correctly that it can import Gerber files directly. Richard and Tracie started groaning and went off in their own conversational direction shortly thereafter.) It is indeed a spectacular example of architecture. From above it looks like a flat lozenge, pointed on both ends. It’s made entirely of glass which is suspended by a huge network of cables and girders, held up by only two vertical columns. It’s so light and open-feeling that at times you forget that you’re actually inside a building. Near the top is a series of curved, white trusses which look somewhat like the structure of a ship’s hull or the ribs of some huge creature.
NOTE: I’m having a helluva time getting a decent connection this morning. This post used to have a bunch of photos in it but I’m taking them out so that I can upload something at all. I’ll try to get the photos up later.
That’s Tracie and Rafael. Here’s Richard:
Yes, he’s a very serious, almost dour, fellow. After admiring the Forum building we took a train to a shopping mall near the water whose name I should remember but don’t. (Tracie’s looking it up in her tourist guide as I continue to type.) Like other malls we’ve visited in Japan, it seemed very new, bright, and clean. We wandered through and did just a little window-shopping; I somehow managed to avoid the temptation of the Sony Life store.
Near one end of the mall (which is named Aqua City, Tracie tells me) is a theater complex called Mediage. On the wall of the atrium above the lobby is a remarkable installation of colored lights which is difficult to describe and impossible to photograph. It consists of twelve narrow columns of computer-controlled colored lights. Each column is probably around six feet tall and the columns are equally spaced at roughly two-foot intervals. (I’m really guessing on these dimensions since the vantage point from which you observed the columns was probably 100 feet away from them.) The lights blink on and off in patterns of blue, orange, and red. If you stare directly at them, you see individual points of light moving up and down and turning on and off. The tricky part is that if you sort of unfocus your eyes slightly and move them from side to side, you suddenly see a complete image moving across the columns. Although there are no lights at all between the columns, your brain gets tricked into seeing illuminated images spread across the entire area occupied by the columns. There are a series of images, such as a fish, an ocean wave, the Mediage logo, etc. There are actually two sets of these columns, so there are two images moving at once. It’s quite striking, particularly because the images seem to come and go as your visual system flips back and forth between trying to see the individual lights and trying to see the images that it perceives in the spaces between the lights. You’ll have to take my word for it, though; obviously the system is inherently impossible to convey with a photograph.
We left the mall and walked to Tokyo’s only beach–an artificially constructed one at that. It happened to be very windy so we retreated from the sand and sat in front of a small coffee shop to have lunch.
Here’s a picture of me attempting to describe the flavors of a little cake-like thing that Rafael brought along. (Rafael brought along all of lunch, I should mention.)
I don’t think that I ever managed to come up with an adequate description. Richard said it reminded him of a Fig Newton and I could sort of see his point. The outside was sort of like the outside of a Fig Newton, although thinner and denser. The inside was about the color of the inside of a Fig Newton, and was sort of sweet, but the similarity ended there. My guess is that it was some kind of black bean paste. It was faintly gritty at first but quickly dissolved in my mouth. There was a hint of malt in the flavor, and maybe a tiny bit of maple as well. (I don’t think that there actually was either malt or maple in it; those were just the closest similar flavors that I could think of.) There were definitely a few small bits of walnut in it. Richard said he loved them but I’m not sure that I’d deliberately seek one out.
Several water taxis and ferries dock here. One of them looks like some sort of Jules-Verne-meets-manga creation:
I’m going to have to stop this entry here. The phone just rang; it’s Rafael. We’re about to head out for another day in the city. I believe that our destinations for the day include the Harajuku area (for people-watching) and the Tokyu Hands store, allegedly a vast hardware and crafts store. There’s more to say about yesterday, including a wonderful shabu-shabu dinner, but it’s time to begin our day today.
