Category: Japan 2010

Ramen originated in China but it’s a big deal in Japan. This might be faintly surprising since ramen’s main virtue in the eyes of many Americans is its low price. Cheap, instant ramen exists in Japan also, but here the appreciation of ramen is defintely not restricted to less-affluent college students.

One dramatic illustration of this point is the existence of the ramen museum in Yokohama, which we visited on April 5. The ramen museum has a full-sized reproduction of a portion of Tokyo from 1958, including eight or so ramen restaurants. It looks like this: read more

Portions of the sidewalk near Ueno Station in Tokyo are paved with Truchet tiles. How cool is that?

Sorry I’ve been slacking off on the posting a bit. The past few days have been full ones and I haven’t found the time to do much writing. We traveled from Tokyo to Kobe today by shinkansen. While en route I wrote about half of a post describing our adventures with ramen. I’m not sure whether I’ll finish it tonight; we want to get up to the lounge on the 37th floor of the hotel to check out the view before it closes at 9:30. For the nonce I present the following photograph: read more

It’s the…

[Inside joke, one of those you-had-to-be-there sorts of things]

If there happen to be any readers of Japanese in the audience, or anyone more familiar with Japanese cuisine, perhaps they could tell me what this is:

I had it in the train station in Kamakura yesterday (albeit with udon rather than soba). It was pretty tasty, but I have no idea what that hash-brown-like thing was. It had a sort of doughy texture inside. It might have been tofu, but it didn’t really seem like tofu.

I’ve been distracted from blogging by a Japanese TV show that seems to consist of clips taken from Western TV shows of people doing impressive and/or stupid things. There’s a group of around a dozen commentators who talk about the clips. I can’t understand a word of it but it’s kind of fascinating in that it sort of illustrates something about the Japanese perception of the West. In most cases I think the reaction is something along the lines of, “wow, that was really dumb!” and they’re right. read more

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. We were quite tired early in the evening and I didn’t find the energy to write anything or even post any photos. I’ll get caught up soon; in the mean time here’s a photo from yesterday:

That’s Noppon, one of the two mascots for the Tokyo Tower. The other one is his brother, whose name is also Noppon. You can tell them apart because Noppon wears blue overalls, and Noppon wears red overalls. They’re quite popular with the locals: read more

It’s about 5:45AM; the morning sun is streaming through the window. We’ve been awake since around 3:30. Tracie just went down to the lobby to mail postcards. Through the open window I can hear crows and a few voices from the street, 19 floors below. Tokyo always seems quieter than I’d expect for a city of its size and at this time of the morning it’s almost still.

I realized yesterday or so that part of the challenge of blogging during this visit is that there’s a great deal about being here that I’ve assimilated and hence don’t feel any need to describe, particularly if I’ve decribed it already in entries for previous years. It’s not that it isn’t still exciting and still somewhat magical to be here; it’s just that in the past it was easy to write about things like vending machines and high-tech toilets because, well, it was all so new. Now it’s familiar and I’m left with one of the usual challenges of writing, which is to try to say something interesting about the familiar. read more

Today we did a bunch of shopping in Tokyo Station and Asakusa. It ended up involving a lot of walking and carrying, and we’re both pretty tired. To make up for a lack of verbosity, here are some video clips I shot near the Sensoji Temple (currently under rennovation) in Asakusa, not far from our hotel. You can actually see the hotel near the end of the first clip that pans from left to right; it’s the conspicuously tall building in the background. Mostly I hope that this video will convey the density of the crowds. Bear in mind that all of these people are here mostly because it’s cherry-blossom season. read more